Pen to Paper

My writing journey began back in 2019 when I put pen to paper for my first novel Dream State. I was contemplating retirement at that point, having spent 33 years as an engineer in the tech industry: 13 years at the research arm of the Bell telephone companies and another 20 years at a large computer networking company.

I visited family over Thanksgiving and was asked, what will you do when you retire? I mulled it over for a while, not having a definitive plan in place for how I would fill my days, but there was something stirring in the back of my mind. Ever since I was a child, I would daydream a lot, pacing the room in circles just thinking about things. The daydreams would almost always be about building futuristic spaceships that I would use to somehow change the world for the better. Well, "changing the world for the better" and what that means to a young child is sort of nebulous. The dreams continue to this day, though not nearly as much. We all have things to do right? Yeah…I admit I'm strange.

I've often wondered, what would people think of my dreams? What if I were to wrap a story around them, one that others might find interesting? A story with a good plot, lots of action, along with a good guy and bad guy to provide context for "changing the world for the better". That's when I came up with the idea to write a book.

When it comes to books and writing, I'm not a novice. I've read my fair share of thriller series novels: Clive Cussler's Oregon Files, Lee Child's Jack Reacher, and James Rollins' Sigma Force, just to name a few, and I did quite a bit of technical writing as an engineer. Writing fiction though, is quite different. I had lots of ideas swirling around in my head for the storyline, characters, etc. but no real idea on how to sort it all out. Where would I start?

At first, I really struggled with how to begin the book. I still have those original words from December of 2019 archived under the folder "my first tries". I wrote down my ideas for the first chapter, the first two paragraphs got written and then I got stuck - for 2 years.

Well, the pandemic hit in early 2020. Just days after I told my manager I was officially going to retire, the lockdown started. It turned out, I stayed until the end of June that year to transition my work to others. The book idea was in the background. I would think about it periodically, and where I wanted to go with the story, but the pages, or should I say word processor, stayed blank.

It wasn't until January of 2022 that I again put pen to paper. On some occasions the words dribbled out slowly, and other times they flew madly onto the page. After finishing the first couple chapters, I tested them out on my girlfriend, and she was reeled in. We would often take walks together and think up names for some of the characters and chapters, and as I continued writing, she continued reading and providing feedback and editing suggestions. I was 4 months into the book and things were moving along. I just finished the chapter called The Art of War, and then I got stuck - again - for over a year.

It would be September of 2023 before I started rolling again, this time the words really dumping out on the keyboard. I guess I must have been thinking about how I wanted the story to end. I could visualize it in my head, like a movie playing out. It took much longer than I ever expected, but after almost 4 years I finally completed a rough draft of the entire book.

What you see now has been culled, trashed, and rewritten multiple times, but the original story idea, the seed that started back in 2019, is still the same. Someday, I might do a writer's commentary on the whole book, and I think it would be interesting for me to print those original two paragraphs so you all can see where this began.