And So it Begins.

By the time I was seventeen, I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom each night, pounding away on a turquoise electric typewriter that I had borrowed from a neighbor two years earlier.

Clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering.

The sound of the keys was a steady beat as I tried to capture the ideas in my head and get them down on paper as fast as I could. Frankly, I don’t know how my family ever put up with the noise.

Clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering.

We lived in such a small space: five people, one bathroom, roughly 1100 sq ft. I shared the bedroom with my brother Mark. I could only write when he wasn’t home or when my sister Barbara wasn’t trying to sleep in the next room.

Clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering.

I know the sound carried right downstairs into the living room where my parents watched the small B&W television. I don’t remember my parents ever asking what I was working on each night. It would be decades before I found out that the Old Man was secretly reading the scribbles that I left lying around the house.

Clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering.

Each night, when I sat at that typewriter, I was twisting words to my will, turning my thoughts into a paper reality, forging something out of nothing. I felt wholly alive.

Clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering.

I produced reams of stories — for school, for my friends, for myself. I lost all of it decades ago in one of the too-many moves that I made after my Mom died or after someone broke into my car at the Westgate Mall. Irretrievable. Irreplaceable. So I started over.

Clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering.

For years afterward, I dabbled on a typewriter that I finally bought for myself, but I produced nothing concrete; nothing worth saving. Or so I thought at the time. Now I would give much to find those old pages again.

Clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering.

I started writing again in earnest at Northeastern University during the fall semester of 2000. I haven’t stopped since. I’ve written on a PC or laptop for twenty years, writing day or night, fulfilling assignments, or fulfilling a need — my need — to write. Twenty years full of creative and academic writing to fulfill degree requirements and, finally, published writing.

There is no heft to the keys on a laptop keyboard, and it does not allow for the same clickety-clack of the keys when I type. However, in my mind, I distinctly hear the clickety-clack, rattling, and clattering of that old turquoise electric typewriter as I pound away on the keyboard, creating my life as an author.

And so it begins.

I am an author. This is my website. I welcome you here.

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“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

― Stephen King, from “On Impact: After an accident, learning to write again”, published in The New Yorker, June 19 & 26 2000 issue.

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