On my fiftieth birthday I had a few beers and pondered what I should do after I quit my job as a sales manager in Manhattan. I know it was only a matter of time until my employer told me to take a walk so I could give my office to a younger person. So now was the time to do a little planning.
I decided to become a fiction writer. I had always liked to write, so it seemed like a good fit. To prepare for my new career, I began writing stories on the bus while traveling to Manhattan. At that point in my writing career, I didn’t realize that I knew crapola about fiction writing (I have an engineering degree), but that didn’t stop me from writing things on the bus that turned out to be almost unreadable due to the terrible condition. from the highways of New Jersey and New York.
My writings at the time were unfocused and didn’t really belong to any genre and were often mixes of various genres. In addition to writing on the bus, I bought several books on writing. Most of the material in the books was incomprehensible to me at the time. Later, the books started to make sense.
Over time, several turning points occurred that influenced my new career. The first was the The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams. Once I read that, I know what I wanted to write: humorous and satirical sci-fi stories, which were later expanded to include fantasy. The second major turning point occurred when a web search resulted in an online critic group called Critters. I joined. Critters allowed a story of mine to be criticized after I criticized a certain number of stories from other members. Both criticizing and being criticized was a revelation. As an example of my sorry state of ignorance at the time, a reviewer pointed out that my current story had POV violations. To which I replied, “What is a POV?”
One day a few years later, my company presented an early retirement plan. I qualified and the offer was quite lucrative for me. I jumped on it and started writing in my new home office instead of on buses.
After writing and critiquing many science fiction and fantasy stories, I sold my first story. The magazine was a disaster: a hand-drawn cover, photocopied pages stapled. On the other hand, my story was just as bad, a fact that I didn’t realize until several years later. So the editor and I ended up tied.
Critters’ experience eventually allowed me to sell more than 40 short stories in paid markets. But then something strange happened. A short story turned into a novel and I couldn’t understand how it happened. My next story became an even longer novel. After reflecting on what was happening, I realized that my characters had become more complex and my plots more complicated, making the stories unsuitable for the story format. My next attempt at a short story was long enough to qualify as a short novel. It was then that I realized that my storytelling career was over: I was a novelist, for better or for worse.
Soon, I sold a novel to a small independent publisher. This was followed by a short fiction anthology for the same publisher. Publishing a book was another turning point as good as reading the Hitchhikers Guide. It led to a desktop publishing decision. But that’s a story for another day.
I have been writing fiction for over twenty years and have enjoyed it immensely. The reason I keep writing humorous and satirical genre stories is because I love making up weird plots and characters. And I love entertaining people with my stores.
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