HIGH, Part 4

So as soon as I realized I wanted to: 1) write and 2) have somebody read what I wrote, I smugly assumed I had it all figured out. Unfortunately (for me) I missed one minor variable in my calculations. I needed an actual topic.

Coming off my Rings read just the year before, I felt the very same thing a very long line of Tolkien wannabes felt before me. I wanted to write squarely in the high fantasy genre. Swords and sorcery! Magic and monsters! Boy, what a concept.

I immediately set pen to paper (er, I mean, fingers to keyboard) and began writing. I wrote paragraph after paragraph, each worse than the one before it. But I never stopped thinking I was still on to something. In hindsight, I almost wish I was writing on actual paper back then because today I could upload for you a photo of me sitting at a desk, staring at yet another blank sheet of paper, the quintessential wastepaper basket at my side overflowing with the quintessential crumpled up failed attempts. (It’s just not the same crumpling up your monitor.)

This was still 1993. I was 27 years old (and, at the time, fourteen years into my mid-life crisis). If I couldn’t come up with a good book idea, then at least I could do something creative with my life. Coupling that with the fact I didn’t want to be in software development for the rest of my life, I started a small video production company.

That went well, but it didn’t completely drive away my desire to write something. That desire was rekindled fiercely when I came across this book and suddenly I got a new idea. I could combine my mad video editing skillz with my desire to write and maybe come up with a pretty cool book on video editing instead.

Next in the series: A pretty cool book on video editing.