Fun, Follies and Loss of Innocence in Novel Land

Tag: book

I try to help a bully

1959 elementary classroom

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.

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I’m tagged as a misfit

Unnerved man at desk

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.

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A flying saucer lands on me

Man staring up at a landing UFO

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.

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I get run off the ranch

Tumbleweed on a road

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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