Up and Running

Paul created a blog earlier this week and, not to be outdone, I had to make one of my own. Here I am. :)

When I was younger, I used to write these long-winded diatribes about Not Much Of Anything. I called them "Rambles," because all I really was doing was just rambling, watching the words come out and the sentences form. They were kind of "writing practice" before I knew what that was, before I had ever picked up a Natalie Goldberg book.

I've been creating stories since I was in kindergarten. I was what you might call a "child prodigy" -- I wrote a novel when I was 11-13 years old; I won countless awards all through school; I taught poetry to my classmates when I was in eleventh grade.

I went on to get a B.A. in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. By then, though, something had changed and I wasn't writing as much as I had when I was a teenager. Try as I may, I can't quite grasp this transformation, when writing turned from Passion into Work. I still struggle with it.

This Blog is my attempt to do some Rambling, for old time's sake, to try to remember what it was like when Writing was my Passion, when the hardest work was only cleaning up my room.