My Writing Projects

Part I – My First Poetry Submission

I started writing for public consumption in the summer of 1992. I submitted my first set of poems to Catalyst Magazine at the end of August and at the end of September I received an acceptance letter for one of the poems (title: “I Be A Bad Dude”).

Receiving an acceptance letter on my very first poetry submission was a fabulous experience for me. I was high on cloud nine and was ready to write some more. I received a small grant for writing from my home state of South Carolina and I was sure that I was on my way to a big writing career.

However…

Things changed at the day job. I worked in computer operations at a regional head office of a Fortune 500 company. I ran batch jobs, backups, restores, downloaded and uploaded data to hundreds of machines, ran tons of reports and troubleshot problems.

Writing was just one of my part time jobs. “Wait, you had a full time job, wrote part time and had another part time gig also?”, you say. Yes. In addition to the day job and writing I also worked in a microfiche production shop on weekends. My calendar was full.

As I said before, things changed at the day job. A Corporate I/T Manager from corporate headquarters visited my site one week. He checked out how efficient I was in meeting my production quotas but he also checked out my writing.

“What’s that laying on the table over there?”, he asked.

End of Part I – stay tuned for Part II – What Was That Laying On the Table?

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