Reflections on the Writing Life
From the time I was very small, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I first started writing down my stories when I was in grade school. However almost all those first stories have since been lost. Only when I was in junior high and high school did I start carrying my stories everywhere with me and kept them in a folder so that they wouldn't get lost.
When I was a senior in high school, I took a creative writing course. Here is one of the stories I wrote, "The Day There Was No Bad News. Although the writing is a little crude and shows the worldview of a teenager, it was oddly prophetic of the coming rapproachment between the US and the now-fallen Soviet Union.
When I was a freshman in college, I took one college-level creative writing course. However, I soon discovered that the instructor considered science fiction and fantasy a waste of time. He wanted me to write "serious" fiction, by which he meant stories set firmly in the mundane world. I found such stories too boring for words, but since I needed a decent grade, I found a story set in Moscow sufficiently exotic to satisfy me while sufficiently "here and now" to satisfy him. I didn't take another course, although I continued writing and rewriting as best I could.
In my senior year I finally discovered my first writers' workshop, the old by-mail Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop which was run by Kathleen D. Woodbury. It gave me an opportunity to correspond with other aspiring writers, although the lag time as letters and critiques wended their way through the postal system was often frustrating. The monthly newsletter published a number of my articles over the years, beginning a pattern of having far greater success as a writer of non-fiction than of the fiction I really enjoyed.
In the 1990's I got my first computer and modem and finally got online. I started out in the old GEnie Science Fiction Round Table topics, and as the Internet at large became increasingly available, I became active on the Critters workshop.
As the years went by and my life grew increasingly busy, I found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the requirements of the Critters workshop and drifted away from it. However, by that time I had begun to be active on several other online fora which permitted me more continual interaction.
My thoughts and observations on the writing process as I experience it can be found on my writing blog, Through the Worldgate.