Not a few years ago, my brother announced out of the blue that he was going to write a book, featuring his friends, set under the sea.* In the best tradition of sibling rivalry, I immediately responded, “I’m going to write one, too!” I decided my book would feature my friends and be set in space.
As fate (and childhood) would have it, my brother wrote his story and immediately went on to other things. I wrote my story (and it was longer than his, so there!), and then I wrote another one. And I kept at it. What for him had been a lark was for me a fortuitous turn straight into my lifelong vocation.
I never tried to sell that story (“You can sell stories?”), but I consider it the beginning of my career, not only because it marked the onset of my “regular” writing habit, but also because when my high school English teacher found out about it, she asked to read it, and gave me 100 extra credit points for it. That was my first writing payment.
Recently, I was combing through my old manuscripts (no, I haven’t burned all my early work, as some advise), and I ran across the folder with that “novel.” And I saw that when I finished it, I recorded the time and date–and that the date was approaching, and it was a milestone year.
I’m not going to say how long it’s been, except to reveal that the anniversary ends with a zero. I can’t pretend that I have achieved all of my goals as a writer, but I can say with confidence that if that boy could see what he has become, he would think he had climbed the heights of Olympus to sip ambrosia with the gods.
I wish I could send a Terminator back to that time to assure my younger self that things would be okay. I’d tell him, “There’s no secret. The key is never give up.” Then I’d tell him, “Buy Microsoft.”
Then I’d tell him: “By the way, this is a Terminator. Run!“
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*His daughter is now a marine biologist. Go figure.
Graffiti on the Walls of Time 