Let me introduce you to…

Sam the Pelican. Were you expecting someone else?

If you guessed that my mystery introduction included a now thirty-three year-old superhero pelican fighting evil sharks named Hammer and Crusher alongside his trusty companion Bob Beaver, then you’re both correct and irrevocably damaged in the head beyond all comprehension. Seriously (not seriously), cue the high budget movie trailer narrator—”nearly thirty-three years in the making…”

I don’t know if I received the gift of the cloth bound book on that Christmas morning of 1988. I do know that I wrote ‘Happy Birthday’ on that dated page and erased it for reasons unknown. I know that I filled every one of those 122 pages with dixon ticonderoga #2 lead as quickly as I could, entertaining myself with stories that could only be conceived by an eight-year-old. I filled a second book with one story, then a third that was larger both in size and the number of pages. My ten-year-old self went as far as giving this third story to my fifth-grade english teacher, only to learn the next day that homework was being assigned to illustrate a scene from one of the chapters. Imagine not being a teacher and still managing to be the reason that one-hundred ten-year-olds were given homework! In the event my photo is tacked to a wall somewhere littered with dart holes….I get it, and I’m sorry.

Despite having no intention to give an entire grade homework, Ten-year-old me was excited to identify myself as a writer. And damn it, I’m doing it again over three decades later.

Life happens. High school and the social lessons learned in that environment. College and deciding who and what you want to be. Realizing numerous times that you were wrong about who you wanted to be and summoning a change. Speculating as to how your taxes managed to go up again and wondering why your Netflix subscription is costing you 19 dollars a month……leave me alone, I wanted the 4K and multiple screens. You get the idea.

Life happens, but I am very happy to have recently learned that when you identify as a writer…when you tell yourself that you are a writer, or whatever your passion project is for that matter…life does not have to get in the way.

There’s a simple beauty in the ability to call yourself a writer. It takes absolutely nothing to accomplish—just a pen and paper, a keyboard and a screen, both of those combinations fueled by an imagination and creative force that can no longer remain confined within your cranium. This idea, that anybody could call themselves a writer is the number one thing that I wish I realized sooner in this process. It has been said COUNTLESS times in many different ways, but it could not be any more true: the first step to being a writer is calling yourself a writer.

I mentioned a few handwritten books I created as a child. I also had attempted writing a novel in my early twenties, however, unless you are r.f. kuang, trying to squeeze a novel between breaks or classes in college is unlikely. I have a fraction of two other novels that needed to escape my head sitting on my hard drive. I’m proud of them, I believe them to be more than worthy of continued work, but the time invested in them was done by someone that did not consider themselves to be a writer. It wasn’t until I had a conversation with my talented friend Becky Schultz (www.beckyshultzart.com) over three years ago. In discussing how it could be possible to create and complete something that would take hundreds of hours while trying to balance all other aspects of life, the very first response I received from her was “…to become something you just have to start doing it.”

The conversation makes a lot more sense to me today than it did then, and in the future, I will start to detail how and why that is. Understand that once that mental process started to develop, there are now manuscripts of complete novels and long short stories on my desk, with plenty of other ideas…

And I want you here with me as it happens, whether it is freelance work, blogging, or published novels and short stories. If you want to engage with me as a writer, have a desire to fire up your own passions or goals and want to share that with me, do it.

The first step is to call yourself what you want to be and to start doing it.

I am a writer.

Thoughts? Questions? Wish to share your own passion project? Comment below!