Origins blogfest: How I started writing

Today I'm participating in the Origins blogfest, where we all discuss how we started writing.

I actually don't remember when I started. The first short story I remember writing was when I lost my first baby tooth. To honor the occasion I wrote a story called The Ghost with One Tooth, complete with illustration! That story is at the bottom of a Toronto landfill now. Oh well.

As a kid I was more of a cartoonist than a short story writer. I did cartoons about time travel, a car race around the world, and a revolution where kids overthrow the adults and take over the world. Ah, every child's dream! My drawings were never very good and the cartoons got more and more text driven, with the words gradually edging out the illustrations. The same thing happened to the famous comic book writer Harvey Pekar of American Splendor fame. I never met him, but I'm in a writers group with Lance Tooks, one of his illustrators.

From about age 12 until my late twenties I stopped writing. I was briefly involved in the zine boom of the late Nineties, writing and publishing a zine called Ichthyoelectroanalgesia about archaeology and travel. I also had stuff published in other zines.

I didn't consider writing as a career until after I got my Masters in archaeology and had worked for a while in the field. It was then I realized that academia wasn't for me and got a second Masters at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. After a brief stint at the New Delhi bureau of Reuters and a couple of small newspapers, I went freelance. Two guidebooks, seven history books, a novel, and a short story collection later, I'm still loving it!