Bookshelf Battle

It’s been a whole year.  As the old saying goes, “time flies when you’re having fun.”

As my 3.5 readers are aware from reading about my first attempt at a novel, I was bitten by the writing bug at a young age.  That bite resurfaced big time in college, when I wrote a humor column for my school newspaper.

I remember walking through a dorm one day and seeing a column I wrote cut out of the paper and posted on a random student’s door.  Wow.  A person liked my writing enough to hang it up.  I was hooked.  I was going to be a superstar.  My major book deal (in my mind) was coming any day now.  I figured I’d better get my Academy Award for Best Screenplay speech written.

Then life, as it does, moved on.  Realities settled in.  I was just a kid from Podunk, Nowhere.  The idea that I’d get scooped up by some big agent seemed about as likely as me getting abducted by aliens (which my correspondent tells me they don’t officially do anymore).

Bills needed to be paid.  Life needed to be lived, and it didn’t wait for me to write a novel.  It kept happening all around me.

I can’t say I have a bad life.  In fact, in many ways, if my life stays as is right now, it wouldn’t be so bad.

But I have for awhile wondered what would have happened had I kept up with my writing.

It’s funny how the mind works.  As a youngster, I assumed if I remained a writer I’d end up a homeless hobo selling oranges on a freeway offramp.  As a, well, I won’t say old but slightly older person, I assume had I remained a writer I’d be penning scripts of the latest Hollywood blockbuster by now.

My mind is a place where there’s rarely a happy medium.

I wish the story of how this blog started was better than this, but here it goes.  I was sitting in a Taco Bell parking lot, having lunch, because, you know, I’m a big health nut and pre-fabricated tacos are full of essential vitamins and minerals, and it hit me.

It was a voice telling me:

Stop wishing you’d been a writer.  You aren’t old.  You aren’t dead.  The technology exists.  If you want to be a writer, then be a writer.

That voice was my inner monologue, but for purposes of making this story awesome, let’s pretend it was a unicorn.  Unicorns are often spotted at Taco Bell.

I went home that night and bookshelfbattle.com was born.  A year later I have 650 or so wordpress followers, 3300 twitter followers, a magical bookshelf where book characters come alive in small, bookshelf sized versions of themselves, and an alien who writes for free.

Sometimes I even review a book.

It would be really great if one day this all turns into a multi-million dollar career that leaves me rich, famous, and the object of jealousy induced slap and tickle fights between Scarlett Johannson and Charlize Theron over who gets to have me, but at the very least, I don’t have to feel bad about not being a writer anymore.

At the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

Thank you for those of you who have been cheering me on from the beginning and also to those who are just joining in.  I’m not sure what next year will bring, but this year, I’m posting once a day for 365 days so stick around.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

P.S. that fight over who gets me would be – “No!  You get to have him!  No!  I don’t want him, you get him!”