Category: Writing

My last post Adventured in Writing Part 1 talked about my experiences as a fledgling writer and how I published my 1^st article. That experience was truly life affirming. Unfortunately, that was my 1^st and last D&D related article. But this did happen:

Not too long after the D&D article was published, my family moved to Bend Oregon where I registered at Central Oregon Community College. When I built my schedule, I took as many classes as possible that related to writing and publishing. Here’s my schedule (Yes, I have a lot of this crap in my binders)

I had every plan on becoming a full-time writer. As a matter of fact, one of my first papers for writing comp was called “Tales of a freelance writer”. Check out the red typewriter ink on this baby:

During my tenure at C.O.C.C. I kept the dream of writing alive and the college newspaper became my outlet. I wrote few profiles of a couple of my instructors. Presented for your enjoyment: my profiles of Art Sanchez and Gene Taylor

One item I would like to note is that these two professors were in the Business Software track at the community college. I had changed my focus from becoming a writer to becoming a computer programmer. If you look at my schedule, you’ll see that in the 2^nd and following semesters I took more and more technology programs. After a little more than 2 years I had succeeded in becoming a programmer. But what happened to my writing? Honestly my writing took a back seat to my coding. I had traded one passion for another.

After spending a few years as a programmer for a local vacation resort I set out for the big city: SEATTLE! After a brief stint working at CSC (Computer Sciences Corp), I went to work for a company called The Juiceman. You remember the Juiceman:

You know you’ve made it as a company when Jim Carry mocks your founder 😊 At the Juiceman I worked on a kick ass team where we toiled building innovative order entry, fulfillment and payment processing systems. For the time this was large scale application capable of supporting literally hundreds of users (LOL)

Our company was exploding at the seams and our team was in a race to keep up with the growth. One night we were deploying our software and things went horribly wrong. A conversion application we had written was seriously flawed and we had to roll back our deployment. This recovery was done with a partial backup I had miraculously created. It was not a planned backup, it was a lucky backup. After a very LONG night another LONG day after we managed to recover.

After some sorely needed rest we took time analyze what went wrong. I took copious notes. These notes rekindled something that had gone dormant: my desire to be a writer. “This could be a cool article” I thought to myself. But where to publish this article. In the next post I’ll talk about getting published professionally.

A good friend of mine C. Robert Cargill  is a screen writer who spends a lot of his time on Twitter (@massawrym) mentoring writers. The biggest themes in his mentoring include: being disciplined and never giving up. I wanted to share my story to help emphasize theme of never giving up.

My story begins in the early 80’s. In the early 80’s I, like many other writers, discovered the game Dungeons & Dragon. I was a player and eventually became a dungeon master. As the mid 80’s rolled around I got deeper into the game and eventually started to go to D&D conventions that occurred throughout the Los Angeles area. Along with attending D&D conventions I felt the urge to write about the game I truly loved. I had a goal: I wanted to be published in either Dragon (the O.G. of D&D magazines) or Dungeon (a new magazine dedicated to short one adventures).

My first submission was an adventure for the new magazine called Dungeon: 

Here you can see my 1st submission being SOUNDLY REJECTED…

Being the ever diligent adventurer (writer) I didn’t give up. I started work almost immediately on my next article. This one would be for Dragon Magazine and had the title “Before First Level”. This one took a long time and I was proud of the work. When I was done I printed it on the good old dot-matrix printer in computer science class (APPLE IIe and submitted it to Dragon Magazine c/o TSR Hobbies.

It took forever to get a response. Oh no, it was another rejection…. But WAIT! This time the rejection letter had a NOTE. Check it out…

Yup I received praise from the Editor in Chief…. The one and only Roger Moore (no not James Bond) He said I had talent. WOW this was EXACTLY what I needed to hear. I persevered. While I waited to hear from Dragon Magazine, I became a member of the RPGA (Role Playing Gamers Association). The RPGA had a newsletter called Polyhedron.  Oh boy yet another place I could possibly get published….

I soon went to work putting together a submission for Polyhedron. My 1^st article for Poly was called “Solutions to the Monty Haul” campaign.

I soon received a letter from Jean Rabe the editor in chief of Polyhedron. She rejected the article:

She also suggested I flesh out one of the threads in the article… I chose an idea related to taxes. I called it “The Role of Taxes” This one was put together on a typewriter and submitted to Polyhedron. Sometime later I received a note from Jean… CONGRATULATIONS we will be printing your article in a future issue of Polyhedron.

My 1^st (non-professional) article was published in Issue #38 of Polyhedron. Here’s the table of contents with a shot of the cover and the text of the printed article..

This publication occurred in 1987 and it took me nearly 5 more years before I got paid to write. Now I didn’t stop writing I just had stuff like college take over a bit. In my next part I’ll talk about college and how I became a professional writer.