Short short version
I have written for newspapers, magazines, and video production. I made good money, for a writer, from writing that nobody (well, most likely nobody you know) has heard of.
This included safety manuals with titles like Hydrogen Sulfide Standard Operating Procedure, Crane Operations, Electrical Safety, and so on and on.
Need more? Well, I’ve been a writer since I learned to write
I stayed after school in first grade to finish writing lessons, not because they were bad, but because I had things to say. My first grade teacher seemed to think I was a budding genius.
Yea, it’s a definite handicap when the high point of your education comes in first grade.
Despite a downward drift in my intellectual abilities, I continued to dabble with writing
Writing and newspapers are woven through my life
My introduction to the world of work was a seventh and eighth grade Indianapolis Star paper route. No writing, just work ethic building, especially at twenty degrees and snowing.
Being published started with a letter to the editor of the Lafayette, Indiana Journal and Courier shortly after I had migrated across the Wabash River to attend Purdue U.
As remarkable as it seems today, that letter became my gateway to paid assignments from the J&C and the Purdue Exponent.
Once upon a time lots of newspaper editors had lots of daily and weekly pages to fill. Assignments flowed, especially If they didn’t have to hold your hand or spend unreasonable time revising.
The High Timber Times and more
My Indiana portfolio became my intro to newspapers in Colorado. I started small with the High Timber Times. A weekly, named, I think, for the surrounding forest or maybe elevation above sea level. It was pre legal weed, so…
I started with sports. Then I segued into covering local government. That led to freelance work with a few other papers, culminating with the Denver Post.
A Post staffer once joked that certain west suburban pages should be renamed Eric Stene memorial editions. It was freelancing, but, for a few years, nearly a livable income.
I drove a school bus to supplement income and get benefits. Between being the equivalent of a fly on the steering wheel with forty or fifty kids behind me and working in community journalism, let’s say I had an inkling on a lot of the proverbial buried bodies.
I also had articles in local magazines and airline inflights. My only fan letter so far in my life came from a random traveler who “loved the humor” in my piece on oddball early attempts to build a flying machine. But times they were a changing. Newspapers and inflight mags were dying.
Technical writing
I pursued a master’s in technical writing. Computers were oozing into our lives and well written user guides were in demand, as were those who wrote them.
Ironically, though, I walked in the door of TIA, a small documentation company, around the same time a representative of Texaco was contracting with them to document a drug and alcohol program. One thing led to another.
I ended up writing manuals for OSHA and EPA-mandated programs. After years of that, Texaco was bought by Chevron, TIA moved in a different direction, and I decided that maybe I wanted to teach middle school.
I enrolled in an ed. certificate program and went back to school bus driving for income and benies. Soon I was “elevated” to a salaried driver trainer and commercial driver’s license tester position.
It was interesting work. I met a lot of good people. The pay was okay. And, I qualified for a pension plan.
Return to telling stories
So I’m retired and returning to the writing days of my youth when my primary interest was fiction and poetry.
For the record, I have no idea what I wrote in those first grade days.
I do remember impressing a high school creative writing teacher with something about her classroom from the viewpoint of the wastebasket by her desk. Let’s just say, yikes.
But here I am with a couple of completed novels and a half dozen more outlined, some short stories, and fifty plus pages of poems. And, I now realize, only so much time left to see if any are worthy of sharing with the world.
As Lucy the dog would say, woof!
