Fun, Follies and Loss of Innocence in Novel Land
This wasn’t my classroom, but it takes me back to that day
Do you ever wonder about somebody from back in your school days . . . and how they turned out?
I do.
Probably the one I’ve wondered about the most is Bub. A bully.
Why?
Because of what somebody said about him.
I tried to do it all . . . and went down for the count
If you read the post A Spy Gets Me In From The Cold, you know I badgered my way onto a daily newspaper.
Finally, I had a steady income, and I got on-the-job training in being a copy editor.
Unfortunately, it all came to an end.
What’s that you ask?
Oh, not the newspapering.
When my year of novel writing flopped, I forced myself to enter the work force
If you tuned in to my prior post — A Flying Saucer Lands on Me — you know that my lifetime goal was to stay in my cheap apartment writing in my underwear.
To continue that wonderful lifestyle, I was counting on a quickie Western book to lasso me out of a deepening financial hole.
But when I tossed my manuscript over the transom of a New York publishing company, they heaved it back like a sack of mealy flour.
There was no more pretending to be a starving writer when the fiction might come true.
How did my Old West saga turn into a space opera?
My previous post — I Give Birth to a Baby — told how I came up with a desperate ploy to get cash from a publisher so I could keep writing full-time.
I settled on churning out a western because I knew all about the Old West from watching cowboy shows on television.
Thanks to blessed inspiration and being kicked in the ass by desperation, I had the manuscript ready to go in a month.
Devotion to writing can turn you into a tumbleweed, but with mind-reading power
If you read my first blog post, “How I Killed My Birthday Party,” you know how I busted up that birthday party by reading before I could read.
After that, like you, I went to school and learned to actually read words. From then on, I always had to have a book to read.
Surely with that background, I would be a writer someday, not just a reader.
But have you ever attempted to do something great
. . . and it turns out . . .
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