When I was in high school I had this idea that basically, screw college! I was going to write swords-and-sorcery novels and/or RPG material. I might never be the next Stephen King or (as Dad put it) "write the great American novel"; but I'd heard repeatedly "do what you love and the money will follow", and genre fiction and RPGs were what I loved. Looking back, I realize that was adorably naive of me; very few writers (e.g. Raymond Feist) surface successfully from diving in with neither life experience nor technical guidance in writing fiction.

Forgivable if naive dream, because if you look at early efforts from Moorcock (ala "Time of the Hawklords"), Lin Carter, Katherine Kurtz (Deryni Rising, if that was her first Deryni novel), Terry Brooks (Sword of Shannara, critically panned as an unsubtle rip-off of Lord of the Rings) and perhaps especially writers like Lovecraft and Derleth who famously shattered the bounds of convention - their early works, even many that made it into immediate commercial publication, feature embarassingly stilted dialogue, shallow or wooden characterization, internal inconsistency and so on.

The crucial difference here being timing - those writers' debuts happened to coincide with a market ravenous for heroic fantasy, even very poorly-written, just as there had been an equally huge market for sci-fi, however cheesy, a generation earlier. Even by Kurtz and Brooks' debuts, the bar for schlock fantasy was rising.

Turns out that while "do what you love" may be grand advice for some people, it was terrible advice for me. I forgive my father for trumpeting that advice because I know every generation has to fight to rise above the previous generation's parenting missteps, and if Dad's parents were as deeply flawed as I surmise, then Dad was a veritable Dr. Benjamin Spock by comparison.

So my guidance counselor and my parents (Mom more than Dad) basically said "nah we're not gonna do that, you're going to college with liberal-arts groundwork". And it turns out writing is work like anything else, a labor of love that doesn't pay up-front. So although I was too fussy to make much of a college education, even though I was intellectually capable, I'm glad I learned what I learned.

I have an old high-school friend who, after a widely-varied career, has turned to writing. He has a werewolves-vs.-vampires first novel out now: Wolf Song, which is set up as book 1 of a trilogy. Never too late to try something new or dust off an old dream.

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Since my discovery that a Google search of "everywhere I go kids throw rocks" yields ZERO results, and my deliberate entry of the phrase, linked and contextualized, I've been waiting with baitlike breath for Google to crawl the site again. It would be a unique hit for mindfire. It's been over a week.

So I've been googling site:mindfire.net often, not hammering it but as it occurs to me, and it should show that entry on the root URL. But Google's cache remains glued to a snapshot from over a week ago. Oddly, when you hover on that side-arrow element to pop up a preview, which I always assumed was a rendition from their cache, you DO see the most recent entries, just not in the summary text. So apparently Google doesn't like something I've said, perhaps something about quinoa or Pereg in the first entry after their last cached snapshot?