I have been a writer since I learned how to form words on paper. Before that, I told stories to anyone who would listen.

In junior high and high school I entered a county-wide writing contest every year and always placed in the top three. My entries often placed high in the subsequent state competition as well.

I went to college to study computer programming and engineering because I had the brains to do it and figured I’d get a good job to pay the bills while I tried to get my writing career off the ground.

Up to this point I’d never written anything bigger than a hefty short story, but some where in the early nineties I got two ideas wedged into my head, and no matter how I tried, I could not convey them or combine them into one short story. I guess it was around 1992 or 1993.

I dropped out of college and joined the army in 1996. During the next four years, I tried to write here and there. I thought I was going to get a Shadowrun novel written and approved by FASA, but I couldn’t keep it together with my deployment and training schedule.

Those two ideas remained in my head, like grains of sand in an oyster, and more and more ideas attached to them as time passed.

I left the army in 2000 and started back to college. I had some time on my hands during 2000 and 2001, and I started writing a fantasy novel. I had to do it because those ideas had swollen until they made my head hurt, and I had to release the pressure. Writing was the only thing that worked. VIEW MORE

I tried to get my novel finished over the Labor Day weekend. I wrote 19,000 words in three days, but it was not quite enough. The grand total for the entire novel now stands at 133,000 words, and I fully expect to be finished with the rough draft before I hit 140,000. I am so very close. Now, if I could only get time to write the last few words. This week will be the week, come hell or high water.

I’m excited; I’ve never written anything this BIG before. I don’t think I ever really believed I would finish it, but here I am, close enough to see the end. It is surreal. But my feet are still on the ground. I know much work remains. I have to edit and revise and clean it up. Then I have to try to get it published. The hard part is really just beginning.