This tangent brought to you by this intriguing entry by SarahP: "I'd like to hear, either in comments or linked to an entry in your blog, about how you started writing." Here's my take (feel free to share your own in the comments!)

I think any voracious reader has thought about becoming a writer, just because if you read the right books at the right time, you can see how much fun the author is having, and you wanna do it too. Like Greg, I always loved Stephen King's introductions and afterwords to his story collections and novels, because you could tell he was having a damn ball doing it.

What I didn't realize was how hard it was, and how the best writers make it look easy.

I was a dabbler in fiction off and on in my teens and early twenties -- the occasional story for Creative Writing class in high school, a writing workshop in college (where I wrote my first okay piece of fiction based on my adventures stealing doorstops in sixth grade), and lots of poetry and noodling entries in my paper journal. Then I did the Master's program in fiction writing at NC State (after they rejected me for the poetry program, thank God!), and I started trying to channel Raymond Carver.

That was my first get-serious moment, around '955. The next came after I sold my first "professional" story, five long years later, to Writers of the Future. That sale included a week in LA in September of 2000, and I got to meet a ton of pro authors, including the incomparable Tim Powers, Kevin J. Anderson, Algis Budrys, and Dean Wesley Smith, all of whom lit a fire in me to write more, better, faster.

And now, a bunch of stories and a couple novels later, I'm coming to a new appreciation for writing. I'm looking at it less like a competition with other writers and more like art and a way to express myself and simply be creative, while pushing myself. It's an interesting place, right now.

I can't forget, though, my fifth-grade teacher who gave me a copy of The Hobbit to read as an extra credit project (some friends and I had already finished all the regular reading projects long ago, and this poor teacher needed something to keep us from getting bored). It's all your fault, Miss Ransom at Xavier Elementary!!! :)