Blog Post #3: I Have Blown my Schedule Already.

 It's not my fault, I swear. To date, every time I have logged in here except today, I have not been able to find the New Post link. Finally I have... a week late. I tried to add a post on Thursday but failed. I know that when it comes to blogs consistency is desirable. All I can say is, I'll keep trying to be consistent.

Meanwhile, what the hell we were talking about? Oh yes, I see that I was going to talk about how I got interested in writing.

I grew up in Fairfield CT during the 1950s and 60s. My mother, Mildred, was a big reader, and there were always books around. My dad did some reading, too, but his taste was limited to Westerns. You know, Zane Gray and so on. Grey? Whatever. Mom was broader -- fiction as well as non-fiction. She would go to the library about once a week, and I was brought along. While she made her choices I wandered around the stacks. The second level had a glass tile floor, which delighted and terrorized me. I always expected it to break, but of course it never did.

Up there were kept books of plays, humor, and science fiction. I'd make choices and Mom would take them out. I guess I got pretty good at reading, because I was soon reading ahead of my grade level -- way ahead.

I remember encountering Robert Benchley up there, and  James Thurber, and the old GALAXY Magazine anthologies, plus lots more, including periodicals like Science News, and Punch, from England.

In Fairfield at that time there was also a children's library, as distinct from the main "adult" library. I went there often once I discovered it. In the children's library I discovered Dr. Seuss and many other delightful books for kids.

Around this time, the mid-50s, Russia launched Sputnik, and the Disney TV show did a couple of programs about space travel. This stuff piqued my interest. I started reading more science, and more science fiction.

All this fired my imagination. As it happened, we had an old manual typewriter upstairs in the attic. I brought it down -- it was a heavy sucker, for a small boy -- and set it up on the dining room table. Slowly I started teaching myself how to type. Almost immediately I started writing little bits and pieces of narratives.

These were not stories. They weren't anything, merely me putting sentences together. At that point I wasn't thinking about writing per se, I was just screwing around.

Most young boys don't mess around with typewriters. They're outside running around with their friends and playing sports. I did plenty of running around with friends, but I was never interested in sports. My idea of a good time was going down to the beach (about a quarter of a mile away) and playing in the sand. Other boys dd that, too, of course, so I usually had company. But early on it became obvious that not only was I bad at sports, but also I didn't care about them. (In fact, I didn't learn how to properly hit a baseball until I was in my thirties.)

I think one of the reasons for this lack of ability and interest was that I was very nearsighted -- but no one knew it. I didn't know it. I didn't get my first pair of glasses until I was in 3rd or 4th grade. Until then I simply could not see well enough to play baseball, for example. So I never developed a taste for it.

I was much more interested in space and monsters.

But more of that later. Next time, assuming I can get this software to cooperate, I'll talk more about the books I loved and my first major "adult" science fiction discovery, which happened to be Robert Heinlein.

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Addendum: This is the first computer graphic I ever did. It goes back to about 1995. I am not sure what 3D software I used; probably trueSpace, if anyone remembers that.




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