It’s always interesting to me, as a author, to learn when other novelists first “heard the calling” to write. Interestingly, most of them say something along the lines of “I always wanted to write” or “I’ve wanted to write for as far back as I can remember”. No one ever seems to say, “I was bored with my job as a nuclear physicist, so I thought I’d try something new”. Or “I was tired of being filthy rich, so I decided to give it all up and become a poor, starving writer”.
I attended a reunion of my high school class—yes, George Washjington was a classmate—last weekend. It was the first one I’d attended in several millennia, at least it seemed like it. But being with my old schoolmates got me thinking about growing up. That’s when I realized that I knew without doubt that I wanted to write novels as far back as grade school. Those ambitions quickly got waylaid. When I told my dad about my literary goals, he freaked. I can remember his warning me in very certain terms that writers “starved to death, had no friends, froze in unheated garrets (yankee talk for attics), etc”.
It had the desired effect; it scared the hell out of me. Despite getting great encouragement from my English teachers in high school and college (those were required courses back then), I disabused myself of any thoughts of writing—at least I thought I had. Law school resurrected the desire to write. There’s absolutely nothing about the curriculum in law schools that contains any practicality. It’s all theories and endless case studies. In a word, it’s BORING! To preserve my sanity, I wrote my first novel while at Vanderbilt Law School—The Quixotics. Harper and Row was interested in publishing it, but wanted to change the entire structure of the story. I told them to forget it, and threw the manuscript in a drawer for a few decades before self-publishing it in 2012.
Fortunately, I finally got my writing ambitions in gear in 2010 and started the Sleeping Dogs trilogy. The first volume in the series, Sleeping Dogs: The Awakening, is available digitally at Amazon in omnibus and serial formats. The print version is available at Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and other outlets. The second volume, Endangered Species, is well under way at 56,000 words and growing daily. It’s taken me a long time to pay heed to that inner voice from grade school, but my writing career is well under way. And I’m enjoying it more than anything else I’ve done!