My life is no grand tale of adventure with a lifelong yearning to write. I was born in the early 70s and came of age in the 80s. Yes, I am old enough to remember disco and life before cell phones, computers, the internet and, most important, car navigation systems. All those classic films of that era? I remember seeing them in theaters when stereo was the best thing ever. I remember my dad taking us to all the Star Wars films. The night he took us to see Blade Runner. I was 10, and that movie scared me out of my mind.

I attempted writing a book in high school, called it Star Fury. It was about an intergalactic war. The good guys had developed a way to create solar flares from stars and use them as weapons. The book concept was poorly developed, and I never finished the first chapter. Why? I hated writing. I hated writing most of my life.

In school, essays were torture. Multiple choice, short answer, true or false. Fine. Just no essays, please. My dreams were of exploring space, studying astronomy and astrophysics. Something I had a knack for, science, math, etc. However, a lack of focus and an undiagnosed bipolar disorder got in the way.

Many years later, in the early aughts, I got my focus back and returned to college a second time to learn physics and math. With a full-time career, bills to pay, and hobbies to feed, it would be difficult to attend in-person classes. After some research, I found a great school on the east coast, New York Institute of Technology, that offered an online program. One degree was Professional Studies / Interdisciplinary Studies with a Math and Physics program. It was a start on a new, exciting path. Just not the one I intended.

Professors from other colleges taught the online courses, folks from MIT, Harvard, Columbia, etc. Being online/distance learning meant no tests and more projects and papers, lots and lots of papers. My first class was on government, so lots of essays to write. It. Was. Torture. Made me rethink this whole online/distance learning thing. At the end of the class, I had my final paper. Which required me to turn in a first draft before the final version.

Among the feedback on my draft the professor commented on my grammar, or lack thereof. He told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘You’re too good a writer to make these kinds of mistakes.’ I shrugged off the compliment, corrected my apparent laughably poor grammar, got my grade and moved on.

Yet it wasn’t over. Class after class, paper after paper, the compliments kept coming. Professors kept telling me I should turn my work into articles and even books. It got harder to shrug off. One or two professors are easy to ignore. But all of them? Saying the same basic thing? Well ladies and gentlemen, that is what we call a trend, and it is difficult for an engineer studying physics to ignore a trend.

Worse of all, if the trend wasn’t bad enough, I realized I was enjoying writing. When I was, and am, passionate about a topic, I love writing about it. There I sat with an apparent skill I did not know I possessed. And a passion for said skill that seemingly appeared from nowhere. I rethought my future plans and that second act I was working towards.

I thought about it for ten years. My focus and bipolar challenges got in the way again. I mulled over what kind of writing to attempt. It was nonfiction at first, mainly because I feared how awful my dialogue would be. In time, poor dialogue fears evaporated, and I knew I wanted to tell stories. Soon I had a boat load of stories to tell, over two dozen. Yet I did not start writing any, always coming up with an excuse to procrastinate.

Then came 2019, and my tipping point. I observed everyone around me moving on to new things. New job roles, homes, relationships, companies. Everything and everyone were changing around me. Yet I was stagnant, still, unmoving, frustrated and angry at myself because of it.

Soon it was 2020 (oh 2020, you bad, no-good year). In February, with the software tools to write in hand, I started on development. As I worked, a nagging voice whispered in my ear. A story idea I dragged like an anchor behind me for twenty years demanded to be told. I knew its characters, story, plot, and world so intimately that it was easy to write. It made sense then to put aside the epic tome I was developing. A fast ten weeks passed, and I had a first draft of my debut novel. I had finally done it, and it felt great.

So here I stand, attempting the novelist thing. Hopefully an audience exists that will connect with my work. Enjoy the stories I want to tell. No matter if I’m a success or failure. At least I tried, and I can take pride in that.