It was a bit long for my usual time allotment and the Merry Writer’s voice was a bit too high-pitched and she spoke too fast for my hearing loss. However, I always enjoy listening to you and I think your blog is much more interesting because it shows both you and your interviewee instead of looking at slides.

You and I have similarities in our background. We both come from Wisconsin and it shows in the way we speak. I noticed that you use the word, so, a lot. So do I. You also have a very good broadcast voice and I’ve been told that my voice is like that, Midwestern. We both started writing fiction late in life and we are both pantsers and prolific writers. Like you, I always got up early and did my work early so that I can relax at the end of the day. One to 2 cups of coffee to start the day out.

But there are differences: Your father was a lawyer and you knew you had to go to college and live up to his expectations. My father dropped out of high school and challenged me to be more than just a truck driver like him. I wasn’t an extrovert, but I wasn’t an introvert like you, either. I was just an average guy and the leader of my twin brother and other misfits who became part of our childhood friends because I was accepting of them rather than bullying them. Roger and I both did well in school without trying very hard because we spent a lot of time in outdoor activities, clubs and other things that kept me from reading or writing except for school assignments.

Your aspiration to be a lawyer and politician put you are a course to journalism. Probably why you took a journal of what you did every day. I considered them girl-like diaries and didn’t seem to care about keeping track except in my memory with the things that that stood out. Later in life, in order to be in touch with family and friends, like my mother was so good at, I switched from writing individual letters to writing annual letters every year and still do. Although Facebook has eroded much of that contact.

My only fear of writing was an assignment that I couldn’t do. I set my sights on being an architect and an astronaut, but settled for engineering technology rather than going to Madison where so many of my high school classmates failed. I went to Stout where I excelled after that first scary quarter and I learned that I was the top student in four sections of our electricity class. But I could write essays about technical things and probably would’ve been a great technical writer had I gone into that field. I ended up resetting my sights on industrial engineering and wrote 60 graduate schools about my desire. After a short stint with UW-Madison, I got a fellowship to Stanford with that letter. So we parted, career wise. Only to come back together in retirement.

Taking an elective in my senior year at Stout, Expository Writing, convinced me that I was a good writer, coming out of that class with an A like all my other classes in my junior and senior year. My career after that writing papers for conferences connected me with other authors and I did some co-authorship, particularly with a fellow from Austria on the subject of general systems theory. In later years I found it difficult to go to writers’ conferences and the only real connection I’ve made is with a local writers’ group.

I’m surprised that you didn’t start on your autobiography earlier. I started on mine in 1992. My work was no longer satisfactory for me to work on it at home. And so many people asked about how I got paralyzed or even wanted to know but didn’t ask. I felt obligated to write about my other lives. Living in five different places doing different things.

My mother has always been the beta reader for my work and she always praised it, even the raunchy parts. Her best compliment was about Hanging by a Thread: “Ron, how did you remember all that!” The early stories were the easiest for me to remember, and Roger to corroborate. In later years, I started to rely on those annual letters and the story became a bit boring even for me, so I do remember doing some rewriting.

Unlike you, I sensed the difficulty in getting an agent or a book contract and decided to go the vanity publishing route. I chose the right publisher and stayed with her many years until my last novel that has been picked up by a traditional publisher but not one with a lot of experience and it shows. So, I never rewrote or worried that my writing wasn’t good enough, just kept improving my writing as I went and understanding that backstories could be deadly, etc.

What you do does seem a bit exhausting to me. I shied away from LinkedIn because I didn’t want to go through the painful process of looking for a new job only to be turned down because of my paralysis. And I found that Facebook was too social for me along with all the others that you describe. I found Authors Den in 2002 when referred by my original POD publisher, the successful author Ten to Midnight from England who ran through start up money for his website in a couple of years and then virtually disappeared.

Like you, I had the pleasure of meeting some of the greatest people of the 20th and early 21st centuries. And we agree on what is happening in the White House. But I’m not writing about it directly. Perhaps the reason I found writing fiction so easily was that much of my writing and research as a college professor was about the future, where imagination and trends come together to form scenarios of what might be. Again like my mother said, “Ron, I hope some of the things you wrote about come true.” So do I.

I’m looking forward to a continued dialogue with you on these pages.

Ron