Comments on: “When Did You Know…?”

By: Kelly McCullough

Kelly McCullough — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:31:33 +0000

cedunkley, LJ thing noted and forwarded appropriately. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

David, ah shucks, thanks. looks at feet

By: cedunkley

cedunkley — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:50:59 +0000

From very young I was making up stories. Writing them down started in Junior High School. It wasn’t until I started writing what I thought was a short story for an English class assignment in my Freshman year in High School where I first realized that this is something I wanted to do.

However, it is only in the past couple pf years where I made the decision that not only did I want to write but I wanted to be published as well.

One of the earliest things I wrote is in a small notebook (the ones that fit in your back pocket). Someone in the house was stealing my cookies, so my younger brother and I set out to find the culprit. So, I wrote down in my notebook all of our investigative findings. Its all labeled “The Great Cookie Caper”. Of course, it was my older brother who ate them.

One a technical note: does anyone here know who set up the Livejournal sydicated feed for this site? It stopped working a while ago and unless one of the writers here posts on their own LJ that they’ve submitted an article I’m always playing catch up reading here.

Thanks!

By: David B. Coe

David B. Coe — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:11:07 +0000

Talented and a Samaritan. What a mensch.

By: Kelly McCullough

Kelly McCullough — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:07:18 +0000

David, Re: Jane’s comment

It was hung up in the Akismet spam moderation queue and then once I freed it up* it dropped into the place it would have occupied had it not been held for moderation (one of the weirdnesses of wordpress I think).

*Whenever I drop in to post a comment or write a post I check the queues and release the real comments and delete the spam.

By: David B. Coe

David B. Coe — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:34:24 +0000

Jane (comment 3) sorry that I didn’t respond earlier. There is something funky with this site and I didn’t get the comment notification for your remarks until the morning of the 14th. Thanks for your comments. I love the visual of magenta crayon on that old computer paper, and I think it’s great that you’ve been pursuing your dream from the get-go.

By: David B. Coe

David B. Coe — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:55:12 +0000

Thanks for the comment and the link, Alma. I think it’s very cool that you still have that early hand-written novel. What a wonderful memory to be able to hold in your hands. I have some of my earliest stories, but others are lost.

That’s interesting, Kelly. I always had other creative outlets — I did theater, too, and then music. But through that time I also wrote. Amazing that you were able to make that choice and then make the career work. A testament to your talent and determination.

By: Kelly McCullough

Kelly McCullough — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:56:28 +0000

Actually, not much. I’m sort of freak that way. From 11-22 theater was my creative outlet and I did very little writing that wasn’t non-fiction, a couple of super short plays that I co-wrote because somebody had to do it. I did a lot of creating, but it was almost all live improv. I did write papers for classes and I got a lot of very positive feedback on that–one of my papers was used for years as model of what a student review should look like in the intro to theater class at the U of MN–but that’s it. It was the combination of professorial praise for my papers and the need to do something creative that made me say “hey, maybe I should try writing a book.” And it was the writing of the book that made me think “I love this, I’m going to be a writer.”

By: Alma Alexander

Alma Alexander — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:35:44 +0000

I dreamed before I ever wrote, and i wrote as soon as I knew how. My first surviving poem dates from when I was five years old. My first novel (utterly terrible I might add) was written by 11, my second (much better, and I still have a copy – handwritten, in pencil, in hardcover notebooks – to prove that I had good plot bones in it even if the writing itself was still raw with inexperience) at 14. There seems to be a vague memory of another somewhere between that age and the early twenties, but then I started on the thing that was eventually published as the “Changer of Days” books (two of them, because the publisher took a look at a quarter-million-word MS and threw up their hands in horror and screamed, “SPLIT THAT PUPPY!”) And after that it’s been kind of full on.

I always wrote.

But I knew I wanted the writer’s life at roughly fifteen – I tell the story in a recent interview, at http://booksbypickles.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-with-alma-alexander.html , if anyone wants to go take a look there.

I like to quote an Ursula Le Guin exchange when I am asked a question about what I would be if I weren’t a writer. When asked the same question, Le Guin answered, without missing a beat, “Dead”.

What she said.

By: David B. Coe

David B. Coe — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:41:53 +0000

But, Kelly, surely you had written before then and knew you had a talent for it, right? When did you start writing stories?

By: Kelly McCullough

Kelly McCullough — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:26:11 +0000

Right after I finished my first novel, which I wrote half on a lark because I’d just quit theater cold turkey and needed something to soak up all that creative energy.