Walking quietly out the front door

Two years ago, I quit my job at Target.

Unlike about 2,000 employees nine months later, I left quietly. I wrote letters to people who’d impressed me at the company, then walked out the front door.

I left Target to write. I didn’t have a good plan, but I had a plan. I wrote two novel-length first drafts in the next four months. By Christmas 2014 I had two novel-length works in hands of a small cohort of readers.

No one was impressed.

So I started a bigger project, in a world I’d begun conjuring late nights at my aunt and uncle’s house in Saint Cloud as a teenager. A world underground. Secrets lay waiting to be found by common workers. Typical shadowy break-out of prison teenage stuff. I was 16. I wrote a novella with a beginning, half a middle, and no end.

I wrote a hundred and something pages. Then I went to college.

In my second year (as a political science and econ major), I entered a short story contest. I was one of four winners to be sent to the larger contest between about 10 universities. There I was a finalist. Not bad. But then I didn’t write much. I mostly played poker and soccer.

I just opened a folder of short stories I’d started when I was in college (I took a writing course each year.) I found about 30 or 40 starts. I never considered myself a writer, even though I’d listed “Creative Writing” as my probable major on the National Merit Sholar recipient form.

But stories are important to me. Stories are important, period. Einstein or somebody someone mistook for Einstein said

“My pencil and I are smarter than I.”

I don’t write with a pencil often, but when I do I understand this quote. Lead — well, graphite — on a page clarifies characters, sketches truth.

I’m a curious person. I’m filled with curiosity. But aren’t we all? I like to think I’ve retained mine. The lust of the mind, someone once said.

I’m not sure if he or she used lust negatively or neutrally, or even with an optimist’s twinkle of the eye. We need stories.

Why, though?

Explanations are many. Let’s start with one.

Because there are problems to solve. Stories etch and carve and try tunnels into these problems. We need stories. I need to tell them. There are a lot of me: we’re called storytellers.

Actually, everyone is a storyteller. Some of us just like to build deeper, longer tunnels into the problems.

And that’s why I walked quietly out the front door.

I can’t wait to show people the novel I’ve been working on.

If you love reading fantasy and science fiction, stay tuned as I will shortly be opening a channel for beta readers.