My mom always encouraged my brother and I to read. She would read to us nightly, reading the same stories over and over again, until we were older and could read for ourselves. When the Troll Book Catalogue would come to our school, drawing us in with its color pages and reasonable prices, she would scrape together whatever money she could and with the help of our Great Aunt Weeza (Weezer to her siblings, and Mary Lou to everyone else) my brother and I would get at the very least one book. Sometimes, when the bills weren’t strangling every last penny from her paycheck, we would get three or four books. Because of this my brother and I read at a grade level one to two grades above our own. My mother’s attic is full of books. Every single one we ever owned or read is up there, yellowing away in a refrigerator box my brother and I flanagled up there one summer. I firmly believe that her encouragement and sacrifice is the reason my imagination survived the sobering and creativity-stripping effect college can have on a person.
I first tried writing back in 1994 when my mom got me a word processor. Up until then all I had to write my college papers on was a typewriter that was as old as, if not older than, my mother. The typewriter was portable in that it fit into a metal case sporting a handle to carry it by, but weighed enough to bludgeon an elephant to death, should the need arise. Most of the keys stuck and their strikers had to be flipped back into their proper places after striking a single letter. Also worth mention: I never took a typing class in my life. My typing skill consisted of “hunting and pecking” with an unsharpened #2 pencil. I believe she spent $300 on that word processor, a very hefty amount of money for us, but she did it with a smile saying, “If you didn’t absolutely need it you wouldn’t be getting it.” I would use that machine throughout college. It’s still lurking somewhere in my mom’s attic.
My first attempts at writing never got past page one. I kept thinking to myself, Who would want to read your stuff? No one, that’s who. Stop before you embarrass yourself. And so as often as I started, I stopped and erased the floppy disk I saved my work to.
The ideas never left my mind completely. They just sat back, in the shadows, coming forward to be thought on and muddled over whenever I got bored. When you drive a car with no working radio you tend to spend a lot of time muddling stuff over.
Fast-forward about 10 years and you’ll find me a college graduate with a wife, children, steady job, and a few fully formed books floating about in my brain that none would experience but me. Then Twilight happened.
I didn’t jump on the bandwagon. I vehemently resisted the pull of its popularity. I watched my wife read every book of the series and put up with her jibes about male coworkers who eventually fell under its spell. The only Stephanie Meyer book I did read was The Host, and I LOVED it! My wife, however, hated The Host and told me that if I loved The Host I would not like the Twilight series. Finally, she left me alone and I still to this day have not read the Twilight series and have no plans to. But I did take something away from all of that. A housewife had written a wildly popular book series!
I couldn’t believe it. A nobody, a complete unknown wrote something that people wanted to read. And not only did they like it, it became an international phenomenon. This gave me hope that maybe; just maybe, someone might want to read what had been bouncing about in my noodle all these years.
And there you have it folks. That brings us to the current date and to you reading this brief history of me. I don’t know if you’ll like my short stories. I don’t know that you’ll like my novels either, when they get posted that is. But that’s the great thing about all this. Anyone can have a dream. And no one but you has to like it.
-B
