I mean. I did. Then I didn’t. Then I did. Then I didn’t. Then I did. Repeat ad nauseum until we’re at the point now where I’m intent on making it into a paying career.

Somewhere in my mom’s cedar chest is a little book I wrote called “Tornado in the Sky”. I don’t remember anything about it, except that there was a tornado. I think it caused havoc, because that’s what tornadoes in the sky do. I also wrote one called “Tunnel to the Moon”. I don’t recall if I finished that one, but I know it started with a spaceship that launched from Earth and did a strange thing: It dug a tunnel to the moon. Weird, right? Well, I was a weird kid.

In my early teens, I wrote a series of short stories about a private eye called Fizziwinker. Was that his first name? His last name? I never knew. The first one was about a missing turkey, which I wrote for a third grade assignment, is lost to history, but the second, “The Case of the Teddy Bear with a Hole in its Head”, still lurks in my files (though the last page is missing). There were several stories; “The Paw Print in the Jell-O” which was about a plan by an evil lawyer named Brad Bockley to take over the world by weaponizing an army of toy poodles was one. There was also “A Scandal in Disneyland” and one about animated suits. I was going to write a Fizziwinker novel called Captain Hawk’s Treasure but I never got around to it.

At that point in my life, I really wanted to be a published writer. I even dared to send my Fizziwinker stories to mystery magazines like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mysteries, but got nothing but rejections. My grandmother gave one of my stories to a friend who said it was a wonderful childrens’ story, at which I was mortally offended. I mean, come on. These were serious stories! Weren’t they?

I kept writing, though. My sixth grade English teacher encouraged me. So did my sevent grade English teacher. Other teachers did too, especially the English teacher I had for the last three years of high school, Mr. Shurmantine. He really acted as a teacher and mentor for me, and I wrote a number of stories and poems that he guided toward quality.

In college, though, things broke for me. My high school career was full of both English and science (both of which I continually aced), as well as chemistry and math (both of which seriously challenged me). So I decided to pursue a career in medicine, because why not. At UC Davis, I tried to do that. Seriously. But my grades in chemistry, biology, and math were bad enough to land me in Academic Probation. Not a good look for me. But then I landed in a class on the philosophy of biology, taught by Jim Griesemer, which I took to like a tardigrade to a hazardous environment. I wrote some short stories but I wasn’t that serious about writing in general. But philosophy, man: I really ate that up. I took classes in Philosophy, especially the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, and symbolic logic. I did great in all these classes (except for the class on Heidegger… We won’t talk about Heidegger and Being and Time in this post).

All my college career, I wanted to do something important. I mean, what college student doesn’t? I gave up on the plan to go to grad school in Philosophy for several reasons, but also because it wasn’t important. At the time, I didn’t realize how important Philosophy would be to me, and how important it would end up being for my writing. Of course, at the time, I didn’t want to be a writer.

I wanted to into a career that was important.

I tried for awhile to be an “ecological engineer”, which is someone who uses the processes of ecosystems to solve engineering problems. But my old nemeses math and chemistry rose up against me again. Then I tried plain old ecology, then environmental ecology. I even worked briefly part-time for an ecology professor as a water sampler. That was fun until it wasn’t.

It was around then that a friend of mine called me and said, “Dude, you should be a writer. A novelist!” He’d played in my Dungeons and Dragons games and he knew how much I enjoyed creating worlds and characters and telling stories. But I waved it off. I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to do something important.

I tried library school. Twice, even. I thought, “I’m good at information and organizing it and doing research!” The goal was becoming a staff librarian at some important institution — like the California Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, library science wasn’t it. I dropped out of library school, both times, because I don’t really have an academic bone in my body. Wasted a lot of money realizing that.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up web programming, which I now do for a living. I’m good at it, and I enjoy it, though not enough to do it for more than forty hours a week.

Dammit, I wanted to do something important.

So now, here I am, nearly sixty years old (HOW IN THE WORLD DID THAT HAPPEN?!!?), still wanting to do something important, but at least wise enough to know that writing itself is important. But… Have I missed the window of opportunity there? My gut tells me that yes I have, but my head tells me that’s irrational thinking. Good for my brain. I feel like all the heavy writing I’ve been doing this past year — all the stories, the novel revisions and the novel drafting — has been trying to catch up to what I should have been doing all along. Which is writing.

Writing is important.

But is it too late?