I was babbling on amongst my friends that some of the fiction that I was reading was not particularly entertaining. I claimed that I might be able to write something at least as good. After all, I had been nationally published at the age of 18 in my field. Could fiction be much harder? One buddy gave me the clipping of a quote:
“If you wish to be a writer, write.”
Epicticus
I started writing fiction on one warm summer day in 1985. I plunked my computer down in a corner of the living room and began to hammer away. To make more rapid progress, I decided to get up at 5 AM and write daily. This was a bit difficult as I was not a nighthawk. By the end of summer, I had 6 chapters ready and decided to go back to read the content end-to-end for flow and consistency.
It was terrible. It reminded me of the originality of the first-grade reader book I had as a youth. My action scenes, intended to be epic, instead read like “See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!” The snappy and insightful dialog in conflict sounded like, “Oh, Yeah!” “Yeah!”
After 2 years, the first novel was ready, and I did find a NYC literary agent to represent the book. It received some minor compliments, but as a whole was not good enough to break into the mainline publishing world.
Writing became more of a hobby than an effort to publication. As the possibility of print-on-demand became available to the little guys, I was able to print copies of the older works. Here is the list of works.
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