I always knew I wanted to be a writer. Even from the time I was a kid. But I spent many years in a bohemian daze, surrounded by great books by Martin Amis, John Irving, James Baldwin, Tobias Wolf and many others.
I wanted to be in that company. You know, the literati. I wrote several short stories, never a novel. I submitted dutifully to the quarterly journals: The Paris Review, etc. Even got a few hand-written rejections.
But somewhere in there I dedicated a lot of time to my career. And writing, while once My Big Dream, took a back seat to getting married, buying a place, moving to Chicago...all the grown-up stuff. It was only a few years ago that I decided that I should write what I loved as a kid: books about adventures and fantastical worlds. And that's when something hit me: I had found my voice.
I was surprised that it took me that long to figure it out. I loved fantasy and sci-fi as a kid, but stopped reading a lot of those genres as an adult. Once I rediscovered it--it was the proverbial lightbulb over the head.
What about you? Did you know the path your fiction would take--or did it completely surprise you and turn into something else entirely?
The picture, by the way, has nothing to do with anything. It's from Wikimedia Commons and was free so I decided to use it to give this post some visual interest. The caption reads...wait for it: in the future, the evolution make all women beautiful. By small jaws and beautiful voices.
That should give you something to think about.
