So, I’m starting a real blog. I’ve never done this before, but I like writing. I’m going to try to post every Wednesday, barring some major catastrophe, like no internet or major holiday. What’s this blog going to be about, you might ask. It’ll mostly be about my life and the feeling like I’m going down a one-way street into oncoming traffic, and maybe a little about my quest to finish a novel or three.
          I first got into writing about the same way I do everything else, I tripped over it. High school sucks when you’re the oddball. I didn’t want to be there and I wasn’t really interested in learning. I certainly didn’t want to do an extra year. Near the end of my Junior year, my English teacher told me that I was going to fail if I didn’t do more work. She had given us all a list of finals we could do.
          “Pick one,” she said to the class.
          Not me. In order to pass, I had to do 6 of them. I don’t even remember what they were now, but I know it made a difference. The same way you can’t remember why you like or dislike someone: somewhere in your brain, you’ve calculated all of the reasons and come up with an opinion and how you got to that conclusion isn’t worth mentioning.
          Fast-forward almost 10 years. Sure, the writing I had to do for my college classes was more demanding, but it felt different. I no longer felt like I was forced to be somewhere, but that I was there for my own benefit. Maybe those 6 finals had knocked something loose… or into place, and the college workload I had heaped upon myself didn’t feel like a backpack full of rocks, all 7 classes of it. The instructor for my Creative Writing course was easy-going and made my peers and I feel like equals instead of snot-nosed kids to a babysitter. Regardless, she gave us all an assignment: write 10 pages of prose, i.e., a story.
          It wasn’t the best story ever written, but I remember how natural it came to me. Some of my classmates were struggling a bit with the typical elements a story usually has. Why was it so easy for me? Maybe it was all of the reading I had done since leaving the battlefield I went to high school in, or maybe it was a certain Junior year I almost didn’t pass. Either way, it was obvious that writing was for me and I had cemented my place in the world as the odd spoon.