A common question to ask a young person is “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Whenever I was asked that as a kid, my response was often that I wanted to be an actor, on television or in movies, hanging out with the famous people I was watching, with no real idea of all the work that went into the profession. I took acting classes in elementary school and was in a play my sophomore year of high school, but never really made much of the experiences beyond those times. Barring that, I wanted to be a rock star despite having displayed no musical abilities at all.
In high school, I discovered a talent for writing and made that my aspiration. I actually put quite a bit of work into these endeavors, writing lots of poetry and attempting a few novels that I can no longer find among my papers. As a junior and senior, I was on the annual staff and designed quite a bit of my senior yearbook, which included my first published work in the form of at least three poems, one of which ran throughout the opening section that I designed. When I graduated, I was convinced I wouldn’t go to college, but, a year later, after finding very little satisfaction in the job market, I enrolled at Georgia State University and declared myself an English major.
At GSU, my writing ambitions blossomed when I published several poems and my first short story in the literary magazine The Review. My story garnered a favorable mention in an article announcing the magazine in GSU’s student newspaper, The Signal. I also wrote a column in The Signal and tried writing several novels, one of which I took with me to graduate school in New York. I bored my instructors and fellow writing students with it for nearly two years until an instructor finally told me he wasn’t going to read anymore of it and instructed me to write something else. This led me back to writing stories.
My aspirations of being an actor fell by the wayside and instead I devoted myself to becoming a famous novelist. Despite this, by the time I completed the graduate writing program at NYU, I was hardly writing anything. It wasn’t until I discovered the Internet a year or so later that my desire to write was rekindled. Posting comic notes to Usenet throughout the nineties gave me a limited amount of fame and at one time I billed myself as the most widely read humorist in the world. None of this paid the bills, of course.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized the amount of work that goes into an actual career as a writer and finally started getting some of my work published. In 2007, I published a huge book called The Longtimers, through an Internet publishing company that I soon lost faith in. After regaining the publication rights, I broke the novel into smaller sections and published a couple of those (it’s still a work in progress). Since 2017, when my play Another Mother was in The Essential Theatre’s festival, I’ve been writing stories and novels set in my hometown of Atlanta. I’m still not a household name but at least I’m moving in a more positive direction. I never thought I’d be able to self-publish but since around 2011, that’s exactly how I’ve been releasing my work. Along the way, I took some improv and acting classes and did briefly realize my original goal of being an actor, though I’m still not making a living doing it.
Having completed six decades on the planet, I’m still not sure exactly what I want to be when I “grow up” but I am more certain that writing will be a part of it. I’m still not well-known but I have gained more knowledge and a clearer sense of direction in where I’m going with it. It’s never easy, but I have attained a sense of satisfaction about what I’m trying to accomplish. Perhaps my real ambition is to continue learning and growing and taking pride in whatever I’m able to get done. Only time will tell where it all will lead.