This month’s Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour focuses on our first work.  I know I must have written a story in the second grade.  I think we all do, and I’m sure my mother saved it, and I have it now.  I have a box of that stuff — as soon as I had a home of my own, Mom boxed that stuff up and gave it to me.  I sifted through it and decided it would be okay to throw some stuff away, but I kept select items, and I’m certain I remember keeping a story. To call that my first story would be useless, though.  I have no memory of writing it.

In high school, I wrote a lot of poetry.  I loved to type it out on the typewriter.  I have a cardboard bound book of some of that.  I remember doing it, but it was the usual high school dreck.  I could claim my senior year trigonometry and physics notebooks as my first published writings.  Self-published, of course.  I called one notebook “Rantings of an Insane Trigonometry Student” and the other “Ravings of An Insane Physics Student.”  Some friends wanted copies, and, during my freshman year of college, I painstakingly typed the notebooks onto onion skin paper (my favorite).  Then I took them to the campus photocopy place, and made two copies (I believe Adnyl and Adnileb are the only two people who received a copy of this missive — if there are more, please remind me in comments). I signed them and mailed them to my friends.  I kept the original for myself (in addition to the original spiral bound notebooks). When I started this blog, I reached back to those titles and combined them to create “Rantings and Ravings of An Insane Writer.” I try not to rant or rave, and I’m mostly sane.  I am a writer.  Once I make it through the revision process and produce something suitable for commercial purposes, I may even become a published writer.  I haven’t decided if I’m going to pursue traditional publishing or self-publishing (on something other than onion skin).  I have time to ponder that yet.