My Journey

My journey with writing goes pretty far back. We all had to write short stories in grade school and then had to take English classes in high school. I had a couple classes in college as well. Most of us also had classes where we had to write a term paper in a class that might not be considered a writing class, like history or maybe science.

Oddly when I was younger, I did not like writing all that much. I am not really sure why that is, because as I grew older, I grew to enjoy it. That is pretty obvious now. My 8^th grade year for English was mostly spent with our class running a school newspaper. We wrote all sorts of articles about the kids in school and even threw in some current affairs articles.

We had a good time doing all of that, but it did not push me over the edge as far as wanting to write. That same year during history class out teacher had us write papers during a couple different units of history. First was the Civil War and then World War II. I picked to write about Naval battles for both wars. This was when I first began to learn how to research and us my own words when telling a story. The biggest problem I faced then, and still do, I am a horrible speller. I am better now, but there are still times I get spellcheck to say, “WTF is that?”

In high school, I again fell into disliking English class and basic composition class. I was not the best student in either, so I decided to take two more writing courses along the way, Creative writing and Expository Writing (How to write professionally).

After my time in the Navy, I went back into the Engineering field and soon found myself technical writing. I started out as a Parts book author and then moved into writing Technical Manuals. Along with this, I also did service magazine articles. The focus was to tell mechanics how to fix Caterpillar Paving Equipment. At first, it was exciting. But, after a while, it was rather dull. After all, how many ways are there to remove a tire?

My creative side remained hidden for a good many years. My wife had told me I needed to write the story of how she and I met. But, just could not do it for some reason. Then for some crazy unknown reason, I began running a story in my head. First, it was a way to overload my brain so I could fall asleep faster. Then I started to run it through my head while I drove.

Now, I sit on the cups of a total creative explosion. Seriously, ideas continuously run through my head. I start to revise them mentally until I either tell my self that it is a bad idea, or  I start to write it down. If it gets on paper, I am going to use it. I have a folder of scenes writing but no logical place to put them in a larger story. But, the idea is now there.

The moral of this story, never expect your life’s journey to be straight forward. Not everybody has an A to B life path. Some of us have multiple hard 90 degree turns along the way.