So I’ve got my own blog now.  My website launched over a week ago and I’ve yet to make that first post, until now…and I’m doing this without the help of an editor to fix my frequent grammatical errors, missspellings, and punctuation mistakes?  For days now I’ve been pondering two questions:  What to blog about?  I’m not totally sure.  And why do I even have a blog?  Because my publicist said I should.  So here I am, and I’m enjoying this already.  It’s fun to just write what’s in my head, which often times is a bunch of nothing (for example, my Tweets are sometimes boring and unoriginal, but you should follow me on Twitter anyway).  At first I started looking up other blogs to get an idea of what to do, but there were so many millions of them to pick from that I got intimidated.  Instead, I turned my computer off and watched an episode of Boardwalk Empire.  I don’t even know if there’s a word limit on each post.  Or if we’re allowed to curse when we blog—which would &%$# if we can’t—but I’ll live with it.  I did notice a lot of pictures that seem to accompany many of the bloggers’ posts, but I doubt I’ll attach a lot of pics because I’m simply not that talented.  There’s no way to predict if anyone will ever follow this “blog about nothing”, which is okay, because I went for about ten years where no one read my stuff anyway, except for those agents and publishers who volunteered their time to reject it.  But things are different now, hence the reason for this nice new website and rookie blog.

My senior year of high school I took one of those tests that supposedly sheds light on a possible career path.  My cousin’s test result said DOCTOR, and he became a doctor, which was cool because that’s what he wanted to be in the first place.  Mine said CUSTODIAL ENGINEER.  I turned and asked him, “What the %$#@ is that?”  And he said, “I think it’s the proper word for a janitor”…which was also cool because I worked as the school’s janitor to help pay my way through high school.  I took pride in how the floors shined.  I even had a gum-scraper we called “Excalibur.”  But that’s not what I wanted to be when I “grew up”.

At the time I didn’t know what I wanted to be.  I just knew it wasn’t going to be a custodial engineer.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  I really enjoyed my years of cleaning floors and toilets.  Not really, but those years of hard work helped shape who I am today, and inspire the main character for my first attempt at a novel, which, now that I look back at it, only resembled a novel because it had a front cover, a back cover, and a lot of words in between.  But it was a start, and I still have about 300 copies in my closet.  So, after the results of that stupid high school test I began to think about what I could do when I grew up.  And then it hit me…what was I most passionate about?  There were girls, of course, but that’s not a career, not really (thank God I met Tracy).  I loved tennis, but I was already tired of playing competitively—so maybe that would be a backup plan, teaching tennis, and I went on to do that for 20 years and met some great people in the process.  I don’t regret a day of that.  And then it came to me before I even stepped on the University of Louisville campus at age 18.  BOOKS.  I loved BOOKS.  I loved READING.  In high school I devoured a book every week or two.  And I loved being creative.  I loved making up stories.  I could be a WRITER!!  My books could go out in bookstores all over the universe.  And I could sign them all, twice, and have fans across the country!  And beyond!  I can do this!

So I signed up to be a physical therapy major!  Makes sense, right?  No, it doesn’t.  It really didn’t make any sense.  But I’d heard that physical therapists made pretty good money, and that some of them got to work with athletes, which was cool.  But when we dissected that fetal pig I nearly puked.  During class I often found my mind drifting to possible story ideas for a book…about a janitor, no less.   And on the day we started in on a real cadaver I said, “I’m outta here.”  The next day I switched my major to History, and felt more at home there.  I didn’t love writing papers for the history classes, but at least I got to write.  And the Arts and Humanities classes were great conduits for creativity.  I got to read more for those classes and the more I read the more I wanted to write.  It was all finally making sense.  I would become a novelist.

Little did I know that being a novelist wasn’t something I could just sign up for.  My son speaks of playing pro baseball despite the fact that he’s not even on a team.  But that’s okay.  He’s a 3rd grader.  We enjoy pitching in the back yard, but I haven’t told him yet that professional sports aren’t something you just sign up for.  He also speaks of the NBA—he is on a basketball team—but I’m only 6 foot tall and my wife is five foot one.  But it’s great to dream.  I also knew that I couldn’t just sign up to be a novelist.  No matter how many hundreds of books I’d read, it still didn’t mean I had the skills to write.  I did a few creative writing classes in college, but I wasn’t digging the poems and short stories.  So I started writing a book, about a janitor, on a real typewriter, and the first draft was really not very good.  But I’d done it.  I’d written a book, despite the fact that I really didn’t know what I was doing.  And I’d loved every minute of writing it.  The next 15 years of my writing career, where I learned through trial and error how to write, could end up being truncated into several future blog posts, if anyone follows past this one.  But in resurrecting these past memories, I’ve come up with answers to the two above questions.  What to blog about?  Books, authors, writing in general, movies, and music will be the main points of the future blogs, along with some posts that may or may not be about anything.  And to the second question: Why do I even have a blog?  Because I love to write, however mundane my writing might sometimes be!  I love to write.

And for the next post…A Tribute to Stephen King!