I'm What?

Or, How my Mom, Geometry, Top Gun, and Mike Rowe Conspired to Make Me an Author

If you built a time machine and went back to September of 1992 and told 18 year old me that I would be a published author working as the Sci-Fi editor for Cannon Publishing in the year 2025 I would have laughed you out of the room. After asking you about flying cars, Mister Fusion (TM), and who wins the next 32 Super Bowls. (I still say Marty McFly had a good idea just poor execution.)

If you sat me down over a Depot Burger (best damned burger in Montezuma County circa 1992) with all the trimmings and said, “Look kid, really, you’re going to be a published author. Here’s how.” Then told me how it would work out I’d probably thank you for the meal and climb into my old Dodge pickup and drive off into the sunset shaking my head.

I bet you would too. Here is how it went.

First off, I wasn’t a well-off kid. Wasn’t even really a middle class kid. We were poor. Dad was a cowboy until a bad wreck in a Utah arroyo ended with his horse dragging him a couple hundred yards. From there we moved back to Colorado, mom went to work at a convivence store, and dad worked as a saddle maker and whatever else would keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Flash forward a couple years to fall ’92; my senior year of high-school.

Some time that September I was headed to geometry class and a dude in some kind of uniform that I’d never seen before (he was a sailor in a uniform that has since gone the way of the dodo) said, “Hey kid, you wanna take the ASVAB?” I asked if it got me out of geometry. The answer was yes. So, I sat down and spent the next few hours taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

I scored well enough that our mailbox started filling up with promotional mail from all four branches of the military. Thanks to having seen Top Gun back in the fifth grade (which resulted in an obsession with F-14 Tomcats, I mean who didn’t want to be Maverick back then) this led to my enlistment in the United States Navy and a twenty year career as an Aviation Structural Mechanic.

Are you tracking so far? Geometry + Top Gun = enlist in the Navy.

Put a pin in that bit of story arc and come with me on a little journey back in time. All the way back to the middle eighties. (No, not the 1880s) My mom worked in the only bookstore in Cortez Colorado. Money for child care being in short supply, I often went to work with mom. Being a voracious reader from about age five or so this was great. I got to sit and read the whole day and since mom was busy at the counter I had the run of the place. Better yet, the owner, Ms. Goldie Fowler, would let me pick through the pile of stripped books (stripping is a practice where a book seller rips the front cover from an unsold book and returns it to the publisher for credit, the rest of the book is typically thrown away.) I could keep anything I liked. This of course resulted in my personal library consisting of books with great back covers and plain cardboard front covers made from cereal boxes and duct tape. It wasn’t long before I was busy trying to write my very own stories. Most of them were juvenile fanfic. The continuing adventures of John Carter, more Tarzan stories, and more than a few stories about Prince Gwydion battling the Horned King. Mom, ever the enabler of my imagination, laid hands on an old manual typewriter complete with ink ribbon! And so I banged out stories on that clickity clackity old thing until I ran off and joined the navy.

Are we still tracking? Mom + Bookstore Job + manual typewriter= I’m gonna be a writer someday.

Let’s step away from twelve-year-old me and move forward in time. It’s September 2021 or maybe October. I’m listening to a podcast, Mike Rowe’s The Way I Heard It. I don’t recall the episode, but what I do recall is Mike recounting how he got started doing what became Dirty Jobs. He talked about how the handy gene skipped him entirely, but his grandfather was a tradesman extraordinaire. Mike talked about how he may not be a tradesman, but he could bring a tradesman work ethic to making TV. That statement flipped a switch in my head. For the better part of 37 years I’d wanted to be a writer, a published author. My personal library has about thirty or forty books on the craft of writing, I’d listened to writing podcasts. And yet, I’d managed to serve 20 years in the Navy without even finishing a single short story.

I’d told myself most of the tired old lies: I don’t have time, I’ll write more when the kids are older, I don’t know enough to write well (hence all the books on writing), No one wants to read my stuff etcetera etcetera ad nauseum. The truth of the matter is that, in those days, I enjoyed the daydream of having written more than the work of writing. I wasn’t a writer, I was a wannabe. Until I heard Mike Rowe combine trades work ethic with being creative. Fact of the matter was that I was getting ready to turn 47. I’d been a wannabe for nearly thirty years. The dude staring back at me in the mirror was mostly bald and had an alarming amount of gray in his beard.

So, I got to work. Up at 0300 (3am for the civilians in the room), ass in the chair typing by 0330 (gotta do the morning things and make some coffee after all). Work from 0330 to about 0600 Monday thru Saturday.

No excuses.

No writers-block (imagine what would have happened if I rolled into the shop as a sailor and told my chief “Sorry chief, the mechanic muse ain’t talking to me today. I got mechanic’s block.”)

I figured if I worked at writing and getting published the way I worked at becoming and being an aircraft mechanic for the Navy and I gave it about ten years (that, in my opinion, is about the point where my skill as an aircraft mechanic was fully developed) then at the end of those ten years if I wasn’t published I could move on to other pursuits. Essentially, I didn’t want to look in the mirror at eighty and wonder what if.

Much to my surprise I had a story placed in Three Ravens Publishing’s JTF-13 Legends anthology by June of 2022.

That is how my mom, geometry, Top Gun, and Mike Rowe helped me get from wannabe to published author. It’s a convoluted tale and I’ve left out a lot of crap that happened between that bookstore in the mid ‘80s and my writing desk in 2021. More of that to come. Since then I’ve written two novels, 72 Hours to Graceland and Ghostship: Derelict, and I have a handful of short fiction scattered across several anthologies. You can find them on amazon.