Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about when I started writing. It’s hard to remember exactly when because I was so young. My mom told me that I would write stories on those huge sheets of paper with the large margins in kindergarten and my teacher would tell her about them.
Before that, I was telling stories since I could form sentences (my daughter has apparently inherited that from me). After that, I mostly would jot them down in notebooks until we got a family computer in 2002. I can vaguely recall discovering that I could write them down and save them in WordPad, and then when I got a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 from my cousin, I began to use Microsoft Word.
It was not long after I had installed Office that I started to write a novella, which in my irrational, ignorant mind, I thought was a full book. I did print it off on the family printer once I had finished. believe it was around fifty pages and was so full of grammatical errors that I’m glad I can’t find it now but I was so proud of myself then. It was basically a knock-off of Dragon Ball Z. I later started working on a sequel (I guess) to that book in high school which incorporated some of the characters but that was also lost.
The next time jump goes to 2010 when I started to write stories once again, but this time, I consented that I was just going to write short stories. I remember one titled The White Dog, which was based on the Appalachian belief that seeing an ethereal white dog was a sign of death. I wrote a few more based on other Appalachian folklore off and on. I would still write stories down in notebooks when I wasn’t near a computer, and then I would transcribe them later. Once, I even wrote a story onto an old Windows 98 PC that we had at a security guard job, saved it to a floppy, and used the company printer once I finished it. I didn’t take writing very seriously until about 2013. I was working security and I had read over 100 books in a year while I had that job, and then one day, I decided that I would dedicate time to writing my own stories.
I remember daydreaming about meeting Stephen King and talking about writing with him. My goal was to one day write a book, hit it big, and never have to work an hourly job again. I have yet to achieve any of these, but I’ve accepted that may never happen. I just enjoy writing and entertaining people. If that’s all that I achieve with this, then so be it. Hopefully my kids will enjoy my work later in life. Maybe they’ll be the ones that hit it big?
