When I Grow Up I Want To Be A Writer .... Again

When you start getting the letters from the Social Security Administration and then from Medicare, any smart person knows that it is time to start working on your bucket list.  At our house, the bucket list pretty well stays on the front burner all of the time.

I have a deep, dark secret.  Several of them actually but I am only going to share one now.  I am a writer.  I have the right to call myself that because I am published and I have made a living of sorts at it.

Most people who call themselves writers are wannabes.  They like to talk about writing and  pass a few things around among friends or maybe even on the net.  They go to writers club meetings and speak knowledgeably about "the craft."  But, of the millions of people who write like that only a few thousand are ever actually published.  By that, I mean that their words appear in a commercial publication and they get paid for it.  Of those few who actually get published, only a few of them ever get to the point of actually making a regular paycheck from it.  I did it and it wasn't easy.

It started when I went back to college in my early forties.  The military had given me a very good technical education in electronics and I had been recruited by a computer company soon after discharge.  They trained me again and again.  I didn't need a college education.  The stuff they were teaching us at the computer companies was a generation ahead of the colleges.  But one day, the PC appeared and all of we blue-suited, white-shirted, Oldsmobile-driving big iron salesmen were obsolete, almost overnight.

I was forty, unemployed and unemployable.  I didn't even have a degree.  I began taking general education classes.  My humanities teacher encouraged me to write more.  She thought I had the knack.  After a while, I minored in Journalism (now called "communications") and began seriously learning the craft.  I paid my dues writing for a student newspaper, an underground newspaper and eventually even for  the local dailies every once in a while.  (There were two back then.) I usually got around a nickle a word.  Soon, I was self-syndicating a weekly column to a handful of tiny, small town papers in Eastern Oklahoma.  But, I was also working hard on the national market.  Eventually, I was nationally published a few times.  However, I often didn't make enough money to pay for my office supplies and postage.

I learned that articles with pictures sold better so I picked up a couple of fairly good cameras and lenses and enough basic darkroom equipment to process slides, the preferred submission media for magazines at the time.  I took college classes in photography.  The equipment is now totally obsolete as are most of the skills.  The only thing that still serves me well is the critical knowledge of light and physics gained by thinking through the mechanics of old style photography (before Photoshop) and of course the ability to compose a useable shot.

I began looking for a job writing.  I found one at a daily newspaper in a middle sized Oklahoma town.  For about a year, I pretty well wrote the front page every day but Saturday.  My beat was police, fire, crime and courts.  I also covered politics as required.  In a small town, that is your front page. Pretty soon, my work was being "picked up" by the other newspapers in the area and I was even making the wire services every once in a blue moon.  For this, I was earning the grand sum of five dollars and change per hour.

I was also receiving a threat of physical violence about once a week and a serious threat from people who could carry it out every few weeks or months.  I wasn't popular with the folks in that town that my editor looked to for approval.  That unhappy marriage ended when I had had enough.  I could see that the handwriting was on the wall for print newspapers anyway.  The smart folks in the newsrooms weren't even reading the papers anymore even though we had them all.  We were all reading the news straight from the wire as it was being reported.  It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that soon, that same content would be wired into homes one way or another.  Even I couldn't see phones and tablets as news media back then but the stench of death was all over print news. I quit, finished college with a degree in Criminal Justice and went to law school.

However, I never lost the writing bug, I just didn't have time for it professionally anymore.  But, I've always had a blog or three going at any one give time and I have been known to ghost write occasionally for somebody who deserves some help. Today, a new item goes back on the bucket list.  From a financial standpoint, I will probably have to practice law until I die or can't make it the courthouse anymore.  But, I am going to spend more time writing and traveling, my two passions aside from Sheila.   Actually, I hope to spend time writing about traveling and then traveling to write.  My best work about travel may no longer go to this blog first.  I may try to sell it to finance more travel.  I will still blog about Sheila and I's little family adventures and our outings with our friends.  But hopefully, you may have to read about the big trips and adventures someplace else.

So, there it is.  I guess I am back in the writing game.