90 Days of Nightmares - Win a Kindle DX!! - Guest Post by Scott Nicholson

The Writing Journey
By Scott Nicholson
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

Every life has one great love story.

Hopefully it involves your romantic partner of choice, but usually the love story begins way before you are conscious of your body and some of the tricks it will later play on you, or the odd chemical disturbance known as “attraction.”

For me, the love story is with the magic of books, and how those experiences led me into creating, dreaming, and loving on paper and now in digital form. My family was very poor, but somehow my mother managed to scrape together enough money for a set of encyclopedias, back when those forgotten tomes came bound with thick covers.

The set was accompanied by a set of “Childcraft” books that contained Classical myths, stories, projects, and household science experiments. I spent many hours flipping through those books, and despite numerous attempts starting with “Aardvark,” I never made it through the entire encyclopedia set end to end.

However, those books taught me the power of words, and personal escape into lands of knowledge and fantasy. From there it was on to Dr. Seuss and Robert Louis Stevenson and eventually discovering I could make up new lands myself, with crayons and paper. I can freshly recall that shiver of delight from those rare instances when I had sheets of blank typing paper. I usually scribbled on the backs of used pages, so an entire sheet was an exciting invitation into the unknown.

I even had a typewriter in my adolescent years, a cheap, clackety, troublesome thing whose keys would stick. Even then I was trying to make “books,” create stories like I had seen them in real books. I guess I knew I was going to be a writer, though I had no understanding of what that entailed.

All I knew was the joy of escape, and that secret pleasure of discovery that always made me feel a little naughty and guilty, as if I were getting away with something and should be off doing worthwhile work like fixing cars or hammering nails.

My teens were filled with lots of stories and poems scrawled out in spiral-bound notebooks, many of which I still have today, though they are stacked in the attic where no eyes can be damaged by them. Shakespeare, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Bradbury were all mixed in those pages, and I contributed to the school newspaper and then embarked on college writing classes. After veering into rock bands and using songs as a creative outlet, I eventually got back to the realization that “Someday I am going to be a writer.”

Someday started, and now I had nearly two decades of influences, and I decided it was time to get serious–which meant write every day or feel guilty for not doing so.

Twelve novels, six screenplays, four comics series, and 70 short stories later, not to mention a career as a newspaper reporter, I still have that same thrill of exploration, even though it’s via a blank computer screen instead of a sheet of white paper.

And even today, I haven’t divined the mystery of stories. I just hope I can inspire one person the way all those books of my youth inspired me.

All I know is the joy of escape, and that secret pleasure of discovery.


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Scott Nicholson is author of 12 novels, including the paranormal thrillers Speed Dating with the Dead, The Red Church, and Creative Spirit. He’s also written four comic series, six screenplays, and more than 60 short stories. His web site is www.hauntedcomputer.com.

 

To enter to win the Kindle DX, simply leave a post comment within seven days and include contact email. At the end of the tour, one number will be randomly selected by the staff of the Watauga County (NC) Public Library.

You can also enter to win a Kindle 3 by subscribing to the tour newsletter at scottsinnercircle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. A Pandora’s Box of e-books will be randomly given away through Scott’s Twitter (follow “hauntedcomputer”). No purchase necessary and the contest is international. All details at http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/blogtour.htm



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