Ten, Twenty, Thirty...and that's as far as I'm going

Rose McCauley tagged me for a new game that's going around. You have to tell what you were doing ten, twenty, and thirty years ago.

Wait a minute! How dare someone assume I was doing ANYTHING thirty years ago! Oh, who am I kidding. As you will see, I was doing plenty.

Thirty years ago--1977--was a big year for me. I graduated high school. After being the most sheltered little homebody in the world, I went away to college in the big city of Atlanta. Star Wars premiered. (As anyone who knows me will tell you, this was possibly a bigger deal to me than graduating high school.)

Perhaps the biggest thing about 1977 was that I mailed off my first completed novel manuscript to a publisher. My cousin Susie and I wrote it together, starting when I was about 16. So I have officially been attempting to publish a novel for 30 years now.

I didn't realize it at the time, but 1987 (20 years ago) was going to be the start of a big transition for me. I'd spent several years living in Atlanta as a single girl and having a great time. This was my geeky phase I've mentioned before, during which I had loads of weird creative friends and went to science fiction conventions and wore costumes and all that. Orson Scott Card was a frequent guest at these conventions, so it took me a long time to realize that he had actually become a pretty huge writer. He was just another guy at the cons. I even took a writing workshop from him.

I wrote a fair amount back then and occasionally popped something off to a publisher, but mostly I just enjoyed it. I walked around in a fog on my lunch hours in downtown Atlanta planning out my next scene. I wrote Star Wars stories and published them in fanzines. I shared stories with writer friends, and even sat around in all-night writing sessions with them. Anyway, this was a great time for me, but by 1988, it wasn't as satisfying and it was time to move on. I started feeling more drawn to God and serious things, and started thinking I wanted to get married (which was going to happen fairly soon, although I didn't meet Dave until 1989).

Ten years ago was a fairly calm time. I was married and living in a suburb of Atlanta. Dave had agreed to take on some extra financial responsibilities (like my health insurance) so I could work part time and write more. I worked about two miles from my house (as opposed to the nightmarish commute to downtown Atlanta I had done for years) and felt like a small-town girl, because I worked, shopped, and lived right there in little Fayetteville. I worked for a married couple--a former police detective and his wife--who had a private investigative firm. Don't get excited. I was a secretary, not an investigator. Still, it was fun reading and typing up their reports, and again, I had a great time. The theme of "waiting" was starting to get to me, though. Part of the reason I was working part time was that we were going to be starting a family. As the months went by, it became apparent that wasn't going to happen. And I had now been trying to publish a book for TWENTY years--and thought that was unbelievable!

And now, here I am in 2007.

That was kind of fun. I would pass the fun along to some of my other blogger friends out there, but I don't know any who have been alive for 30 years.

Oh well, if you want to visit other folks who were tagged, you can visit Rose's blog to see a list:

Rose McCauley, Christian Author: http://www.rosemccauley.blogspot.com/