I once read an essay written by Randy Ingermanson, a sci-fi and Christian novelist, where he talked about how he got started as a writer while working as a physicist. He said that once he decided to get seriousabout his writing, he invested in books, classes and conferences to learn the craft.
That has always stuck with me.
I’m getting serious about my writing.
I joined the Gotham Writer’s Workshops out of NYC.
I’m taking a 10-week online course in Fiction Writing. Recently, I was toying with the idea of taking a screenwriting class with GWW, but after some soul searching, I knew I had to go with my gut and take the fiction class.
Knowing I wanted to get some formal instruction, I researched dozens and dozens of online writing courses over a 2-month period. All roads kept leading back to Gotham. It is by far the most respected and highly regarded school of its kind. So I signed up this week.
I hope it lives up to its reputation. I’m willing to do the work.
The class sizes are a maximum of 18 participants, so it allows for more personal access to the instructor and better interaction between participants in the class.
Our class has 16 participants – fifteen of which are from the various parts of the U.S. and one from Grand Fond, in the Guadeloupe archipelago of the French Caribbean.
The first request was to submit a bio about ourselves. Several people have bio’s and experiences that seem to be on the same page as myself.
My submission was as follows:
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Okay, I’ll try to be brief here…
My wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary a month ago. We have three children, the youngest of which is 16 and he just received his driver’s license this week. Ugh. Our oldest daughter is going into her junior year in college and is working toward a career as an English teacher. Our middle child, another daughter, will be a senior in high school this year and wants to go to college for fashion design. In addition, we also have a herd of eight cats with varying personalities (man, I wish I had a dog).
I was born in New York. When I was 10, we moved to England for a short bit and then we were off to a small town in Germany for a couple of years, where I lived the life of Tom Sawyer. It was the best two years of my childhood. We moved back to Long Island, New York where I completed public school, dropped out of college, traveled, had a few crappy jobs then landed a position as a street messenger in Manhattan’s financial district and worked my way up to a spot in IT. I took a job transfer to Massachusetts, but decided we’d like to live in and commute from New Hampshire.
I earned a late-bloomer B.S. degree in Finance and now work as a financial analyst for the human resources division of a major private financial institution. I really like what I do.
In person I’m an introvert by nature, but find I am able to express myself much better on the written page. I’m a big guy and have been told often that because of my size and the way I hold myself, I look “scary’ or “intimidating”, but I don’t mean to be. People have also said my facial expression makes me look as though I’m “mean” or “pissed-off” all of the time, but really…I’m not. It must be a holdover from the tough times I had growing up in New York. I guess it’s true when they say, “You can take the man out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of the man”.
As much as I enjoy my job, I have had a passion for reading and writing stories since I was very young. I am mildly dyslexic so I read slowly, but I read a lot. My core genre interests are in horror and action/adventure, but I read widely outside of those realms. Out of a long list of authors I like to read, some of my all-time favorites are: Stephen King, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Dean Koontz, Bill Bryson, Neil Gaiman, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard and Scott Sigler.
I have a bad habit of beginning stories but not finishing them. I have file folders filled with story ideas and unfinished stories. In the fall of 2001, I joined NaNoWriMo.org. My story writing progressed, but I didn’t complete a full novel until 2004. Most of the novels I wrote suck…badly, but I’ve been improving every year. The side benefit to NaNoWriMo is that it helped improve my writing enough to where I had the courage to query and write freelance articles for some motorcycle/chopper magazines (another interest of mine).
I infrequently maintain a couple of public writer-centric blogs: WritersReport2.0 (for 2 years) and 1667 Words-a-Day (for 6 years), as well as a private blog. Most of my current writing has involved essays and commentary, but I’m also working on some short stories.
In my free-time I participate in paranormal investigations using a pragmatic science-based approach. This avocation provides plenty of interesting experiences to draw from for the type of stories I like to write.
What I’m hoping to get out of this GWW class is to learn the craft of writing fiction – the right way – and to get the needed critical instruction and feedback to take me to the next level.
Sorry…I lied about being brief.
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I am really looking forward to this class.
