Before my mother loaned me her typewriter, she bought me a diary. I filled it. Finished it, then bought my own notebooks and that’s how I wrote until she said “I have a typewriter you can use” and I did. In that way, I owe my mom my writing career and she is my biggest fan. She can’t read anymore, she says the words collapse on the page like dominos. This is the saddest thing. She loved reading as much as I do. We talked about books all the time. We would get together for lunch and then go to bookstores. We’d often swap books. My dad and I do the same thing.
It was exactly like this. Even the same case! I used her typewriter for years. It’s like I always knew she was a writer. Why else would she have a typewriter? My dad bought it for her from Uncle Quinten, my grandmother’s brother, who we all thought was rich. Turns out, he sold typewriters. How rich could a typewriter salesman be? We visited him once and he had a built in pool and a big pretty house. That was rich to me when I was on the cusp of becoming a teen.
Years went by before I started to talk to my mom about my own writing. She told me she had sent a few of her stories to my third-grade teacher. I went to three schools in third grade. It was the year Kennedy died and the first time my mom had been the one to leave home, with us. I never saw her, she worked so much. My Aunt Louise lived with us and watched us. She also worked at the China Boy, where one day I would work, too.
PS Mom and Dad got back together before third grade ended. Of course they did!
Mom said my teacher (I forget his name but he drove me home from school one day in his fancy sports car) thought her stories were good. She never did graduate from high school, but she was very smart. I published one of her stories in my first book and all my students loved it. People who were not my students read it and loved it. My family all loved it, too. The characters were familiar: my mom, dad, and dad’s cat Sam who used to sleep with his nose in my dad’s slipper.
I typed out all my early manuscripts on that Olympia typewriter. It took strong fingers to press those keys. Only way you could correct it was with White Out. Only way you could get two copies was to use a carbon. Writers always wanted two copies. Publishers did not like carbon copies, so once you sent your poems off to a magazine (and later entire books) to publishers with a SASE, self-addressed stamped envelope, you might never see those originals again. But usually, a year or two down the road, you’d get them back in an envelope with your own handwriting. Depending on whether the envelope was thick as three poems and a cover letter, my heart would sink or swim.
By the time I married Al, the envelopes sometimes held checks. I opened one in front of him, $500 for a short story. I kept all those little magazines with the poems and stories. I even saved my early book reviews, clipped out of newsprint and placed in a portfolio. When computers got going, publishing sprouted up in all directions and made everything much easier and therefore the competition was much greater. I knew it was the beginning of the end of the old way of publishing. I had always had one thing on my side: I was persistent. Having that quality counted (and still counts to a lesser extent) more than how good of a writer you were. Because it takes a long time and the rewards are slim. Especially if you need a paycheck.
Al and I got married and I self-published my first book the same year Kindle and KDP came out. I am equally a reader and writer so I am versed in the Kindle. I probably would have given writing up by now if not for the internet and e-books. Too much fuss for not enough reward and it takes an age to get that rejection slip back. One packet of poems came back with a terse “No. Not these.” Brutal. One of my first novels came back with this helpful comment “Your cover letter was so much better than your manuscript. Learn your craft.”
I didn’t know what craft was. So I bought more books. Not on Kindle. I read novels on Kindle and I read how-to and reference books in hardcover. I still love highlighting and taking notes in the margins of my favorite how-to craft books.
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