DD,
Pretty slow board over here. You should ask iHub to put you in as Moderator since both Moderator and Assistant are absent.
Your comment about writing ...
I have two sons. One is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at a JC in Berkeley, and he has a few written words in circulation.
The other one owns an IT company but does everything well. While in college, one of his teachers accused him of plagiarism because his article was written too well. Jump back in time ... in junior high I didn't like to read anything unless it was very technical, and I also didn't like to write. Preferred to invent things or throw rocks or climb trees. One day everyone in the English class was asked to write a story and had several days to complete it. Sheesh, I sure didn't want to do that. Got inspired one of those days so I wrote something. The teacher accused me of plagiarism.
Several years ago I had a relationship with a woman who had a PhD in English Lit. I don't know how I run into these kinds of people; I've got to learn to be a little more careful. She knew I didn't like to read (unless, as I already wrote, it was very technical) but one day she bought an armload of books as a gift to me, all classics. She looked so proud of herself, I couldn't make her take them back. I would have preferred some chocolates. I was supposed to read all those in high school, but I didn't read a single one. I'm pretty proud about my ability to squeak through on that, though I had a little help. My mother was a teacher of English and Spanish (and history and math) so she had Quick Notes in the basement, and I used those to get past the exams.
After my friend and I parted ways I started to read one of the books, Walden. I believe she gave me that book as she thought the author and I have a lot in common (other than him being deader than a doornail). Just a theory. Hell, she might have been right -- I did pick that one out of the bunch first. Got hooked. Read all the dang books then started reading poetry and collections of short stories that I picked out all by myself. It was all downhill from there as I started writing small stories and poems and emailing them off to friends. I'll probably never fully recover.
Writers don't write because they want to ... they write because they have to. As they say: once the genie has been loosed, you can't put it back in the bottle.
