- Joined
- Aug 29, 2011
- Messages
- 122
- Reaction score
- 28
Hello, all. I've been poking around here for a couple of days, and you seem to have a swell place. I'm hoping to fit right in!
Out here in the big scary real world I go by Joseph S. Walker (the S. being a desperate attempt to distinguish myself from the 4 million other Joe Walkers). I'm a 40something kinda-sorta academic type, meaning I've given up on getting a real tenure-track job and now just teach online classes for a number of schools. I do have the PhD, though, and someday I'll meet someone who's impressed by that.
Let's get to what matters, though: the writing. I've always wanted to be a writer--by which I mean a writer of fiction (I've published a dozen or so academic essays, but to me they don't count). I got really sidetracked by my academic career, though; there's nothing like literary theory to make you question the worth of every word you put down. Still, I somehow just always assumed that someday...
Well, someday came last year when I entered a local short playwriting contest and, to my utter astonishment, won. This in turn led to me joining a writing workshop sponsored by the theater company, and THAT in turn led to me finally actually finishing some stories, instead of just writing a few paragraphs, saving the file, and forgetting all about it. I even sent a few things out, hoping to get some constructive feedback.
And that's when the big shock came: I actually sold something. Specifically, I sold my story "The Penthouse View"--begun in the workshop in response to an "update a fairy tale" prompt--to "Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine," and it's going to appear in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue (on the stands in November--buy a copy or three, won't you?). That really got me into gear, and since I made the sale in April I've sent out almost a dozen other stories to various journals and magazines. The new ejournal "A Few Lines" took one of my stories, and "The First Line" took another, "Infamous," which will be in their Fall 2011 issue.
In short, I'm having the time of my life. I've discovered that thinking about writing isn't nearly as much fun as actually writing--the satisfaction of finishing a story and sending it off, the thrill of suddenly realizing how to make a scene work, the enjoyment of simply playing around with an idea. I've got a few more stories I'm working on, and there's a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo several years back that I'm dusting off with the intention of putting it on the Kindle.
OK, enough babbling. I've got pages to write before I go to bed!
Out here in the big scary real world I go by Joseph S. Walker (the S. being a desperate attempt to distinguish myself from the 4 million other Joe Walkers). I'm a 40something kinda-sorta academic type, meaning I've given up on getting a real tenure-track job and now just teach online classes for a number of schools. I do have the PhD, though, and someday I'll meet someone who's impressed by that.
Let's get to what matters, though: the writing. I've always wanted to be a writer--by which I mean a writer of fiction (I've published a dozen or so academic essays, but to me they don't count). I got really sidetracked by my academic career, though; there's nothing like literary theory to make you question the worth of every word you put down. Still, I somehow just always assumed that someday...
Well, someday came last year when I entered a local short playwriting contest and, to my utter astonishment, won. This in turn led to me joining a writing workshop sponsored by the theater company, and THAT in turn led to me finally actually finishing some stories, instead of just writing a few paragraphs, saving the file, and forgetting all about it. I even sent a few things out, hoping to get some constructive feedback.
And that's when the big shock came: I actually sold something. Specifically, I sold my story "The Penthouse View"--begun in the workshop in response to an "update a fairy tale" prompt--to "Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine," and it's going to appear in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue (on the stands in November--buy a copy or three, won't you?). That really got me into gear, and since I made the sale in April I've sent out almost a dozen other stories to various journals and magazines. The new ejournal "A Few Lines" took one of my stories, and "The First Line" took another, "Infamous," which will be in their Fall 2011 issue.
In short, I'm having the time of my life. I've discovered that thinking about writing isn't nearly as much fun as actually writing--the satisfaction of finishing a story and sending it off, the thrill of suddenly realizing how to make a scene work, the enjoyment of simply playing around with an idea. I've got a few more stories I'm working on, and there's a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo several years back that I'm dusting off with the intention of putting it on the Kindle.
OK, enough babbling. I've got pages to write before I go to bed!
Welcome from a another writer of a certain age.
