The Write Stuff

My wife was president of her chapter of the California Writer's Club for (checks watch) about eleventy-seven years. Kind of funny how they would call a smaller group of writers a "chapter" but that is just a funny little bit on the way to my larger point: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the California Writer's Club. I live in California. I write. What's the problem?
Well, let's start with the wisdom of Groucho Marx who insisted that he would never be a member of any club that would have him as a member. Which is pretty solidly the camp in which I find myself. Not that this is much of a camp, what with all that misanthropy and so on. Part of the reason I started writing was because I was such a misanthrope. I wrote because it was something I could do on my own. I could create worlds to surround me that conformed with the reality that was missing in my day to day. One of my earliest efforts had Snoopy quarterbacking the Denver Broncos. This enabled second grade me to mix my passions without fear of reprisal. I had figured out that being clever with words was a pretty good way to entrance others into believing that I wasn't just that round kid with glasses who always got one hundred percent on the spelling test.
In fourth grade, I was encouraged to mine my feelings of being a social outcast by creating picture story books that centered on characters who were lost and lonely. The fact that I borrowed shamelessly from Harry Nilsson's The Point was lost on my fellow students who marveled at my ability to both write and draw. Arthur the Fish. Larry the Lion. Bubbles the Bear was a side project that I illustrated for a friend who was anxious to follow in my footsteps. The way he borrowed from my previously borrowed plot was homage on top of homage. It made me a star at my elementary school, culminating in sixth grade when my stories, poems and cartoons were sprinkled across Columbine's collection of student work. It might also have had something to do with the fact that my father was in charge of getting the thing published, but it's not what you know, after all it's whom.
Junior high and high school did not offer as much opportunity for my muses. Not at school, anyway. It was during this time that I acquired my first typewriter and began hammering out flurries of thought and what I believed was wisdom, much of which coalesced into my lightly titled Great American Novel, written in longhand over the course of a tortured Memorial Day weekend just prior to moving from ninth to tenth grade.
My peers were stunned and amazed at that forty-two page epistle to and from The Voice From The Great Beyond. It wasn't really so beyond. It was in my head. The device made me appear more clever, which was really the reason why I was in the game in the first place. I took a Creative Writing class when I was in the eleventh grade, which was enough to make me wish that I could just stop those voices. It was a lot of requirements and editing. Not that I felt truly creative when I was trying to unravel the vagaries of punctuation and syntax.
No surprise, perhaps, that I found myself entering my freshman year in college as a studio art major. Not that the voices in my head stopped. By this point, I had been gifted by my parents with an electric typewriter through which all those thoughts kept coming. I harbored dreams of becoming an artist, maybe even a writer, but I didn't discuss them. My writing was only for those in my inner circle then. Perhaps not the best way to find fame and fortune as an author. Or anything.
It wasn't until my fourth year in college that I was forced into a corner: declare a major or prepare to spend the rest of your natural life as an undergraduate. I gathered up my loose credits and took them to an academic advisor. He pointed out that I had taken more than enough literature courses, and more than my share of creative writing workshops to cobble together a degree in Creative Writing. If only I would stop doing that and take a science or history class to meet requirements for graduation.
Which I did. Leaving me out on the streets of the Real World with a diploma and no real idea about how to use it. I spend the next few years attempting to get published in literary magazines, submitting my obtuse prose and poetry to everyone from the New Yorker to literary zines that paid exclusively in author's copies. It was one of the latter that I found "success." Three of my bleak, non-rhyming stares into the abyss were picked up by a publication called The Strain.
I felt that I had arrived.
I hadn't.
So, at the urging of a friend who was on his way to a career in screenwriting to give that a shot. I knew movies. I watched a lot of TV. How hard could it be to harness those tropes that had become nearly second nature to me after all those years? Answer: Pretty. I made a few fits and starts at a Northern Exposure script that I hoped would be picked up on spec. It never got sent off. So that didn't happen. But it was enough for someone from that inner circle to take notice. She thought it was amazing that I would put myself out there like that and create a world within a world. So impressed with that idea, she married me.
And she became the president of her branch of the California Writer's Club, of which I am not a member. I write a blog.
How's that for a story?