Being a Storyteller: A Guest Post From Sheila Deeth

Today we welcome talented author, Sheila Deeth, as she stops by on her blog tour for her new book, Divide by Zero.  She chats about her writing, her book and...

Being a Storyteller  

I love to write but, more importantly, I love telling stories. I’ve been telling stories since long before I learned to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. In elementary school the teachers of older classes would send students to “borrow” me, so I could keep the class quiet with a story while the teacher stepped out of the room. I imagined all sorts of exciting lives for an every-changing cast of characters ranging from cats and dogs to superheroes and angels and saints. Then in high school a teacher asked for an essay on whether I’d prefer a short exciting life or a long boring one. Which one would you choose?

Short and exciting seemed like the obvious answer. After all, if I didn’t want a short exciting life, why did I keep telling short exciting stories? But I’d learned the joy of making people cry somewhere along the line. (My teacher said it’s much harder to make them laugh, but I was working on that.) Class-mates cry when heroes and heroines die. And short exciting lives do tend to end in haunting tears.

I’d already started my essay but I turned it around. No, I thought, I don’t want a short exciting life. I want a really long and boring one in which I can write a million books and live and die vicariously through the characters I create.

Of course, in school I had a captive audience for those tales. I still remember the faces of elementary students as I perched precariously on the teacher’s chair. I still remember high-school friends sitting silent while the teacher read out one of my stories. But real life, long and boring, was soon joyously filled with the excitement of growing children. My new captive audience was my kids and I told them exciting stories while delighting in their lives. Now they’re grown. I’ve started writing those “million books” and I wonder if anyone will read them. My precious needling words hide in a haystack as big as the world or, at least, as big as the internet. My teacher’s chair sits in front of a blank computer screen. And I can’t see my audience.

Will you read my book? If you do, I just might make you cry, like I did in school. I hope I’ll make you laugh a bit as well. And I hope you’ll feel the time spent with my characters was well-employed. For the most part, they’re just living their everyday lives, joyously filled with the excitement of growing children, and haunting overshadowed by the past. But even some relatively boring lives get cut short. And excitement might be less important than knowing how to move on.

Divide by Zero creeps into the heart of community, then watches a small boy’s innocence and wisdom set that heart beating again after trauma intervenes. I hope you’ll read it but, more importantly, I hope you’ll like it.

Divide by Zero

It takes a subdivision to raise a child, and a wealth of threads to weave a tapestry, until one breaks.

Troy, the garage mechanic’s son, loves Lydia, the rich man’s daughter. Amethyst has a remarkable cat and Andrea a curious accent. Old Abigail knows more than anyone else but doesn’t speak. And in Paradise Park a middle-aged man keeps watch while autistic Amelia keeps getting lost.

Pastor Bill, at the church of Paradise, tries to mend people. Peter mends cars. But when that fraying thread gives way it might take a child to raise the subdivision—or to mend it.

Divide by Zero is available from:

Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Divide-Zero-Sheila-Deeth/dp/1600763405/
http://www.amazon.com/Divide-by-Zero-ebook/dp/B0090NFH56/

Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/Divide-Zero-Sheila-Deeth/dp/1600763405/ 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Divide-by-Zero-ebook/dp/B0090NFH56/

Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/divide-by-zero-sheila-deeth/1112782597

Powells http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781600763403-0

Waterstones http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/sheila+deeth/divide+by+zero/9420931/

And more.

Author Bio:

Sheila Deeth grew up in the UK and has a Bachelors and Masters in mathematics from Cambridge University, England. Now living in the States near Portland Oregon, she enjoys reading, writing, drawing, telling stories and meeting her neighbors' dogs on the green.

Sheila can be found on her website: http://www.sheiladeeth.com

Find her books at http://www.sheiladeethbooks.com

Or connect with her on:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sheila.deeth
http://www.facebook.com/SheilaDeethAuthor

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sheila-deeth/17/21b/3b9

Gather: http://smd.gather.com/

Goodreads:  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2853735.Sheila_Deeth

Blogger: http://sheiladeeth.blogspot.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sheiladeeth
 

Interview with E. A. Setser, Author of Elder Blood

Another interview today, as author E. A. Setser drops by to chat about his fantasy book, Elder Blood, and other writing related things.

Interview with E. A. Setser

Why don’t you begin by telling everyone a bit about yourself?

Ah, let’s see… I grew up in and around Knoxville, TN. Like a lot of folks that get into writing fantasy, I was an outcast as an adolescent, and that carried over into adulthood. That was part of my motivation to move – the other being employment – out of there and head for Cincinnati, OH. Right now, I work at a sign design and manufacturing company. I do material purchasing – shopping around, tracking down the best and quickest deals, negotiating with vendors – database administration, costing, pricing, production work, technical support and repairs. I’m kind of the company spackle.

Been married for three years. We have one kid, a little boy, three years old. For anyone who cares, we were not married when he was born, but we had been engaged for six months when he was conceived. We’re looking at pre-schools for him and looking to get into Cincinnati proper (living in Covington, KY, couple miles short) before he’s in 2^nd grade.

Could you please tell us about your book, Elder Blood?

Gladly!

This is the jump-off point for my ongoing series, The Epimetheus Trial. I call it that because, while it’s the first book, it’s not the beginning of the timeline. Anyway…

It spans two generations, starting 17 years before the meat of the story. The first few chapters time lapse across that period, setting up establishing events along the way and giving insight into what made the characters and their world the way it is.

It takes place in a fictional world, on an archipelago continent called Ouristihra. People of ArcNos, the world’s military superpower, start turning up traces of a clandestine high-powered organization. These Avatars of Fate, as they’re called, eventually surface and seize control of ArcNos by pushing their newest protégé up the hierarchy. This splinters the nation, and those not among the elite and their chosen, are cast into the gutters. Also, a couple of the Avatars use the term “god” on a couple of occasions, but the very concept of religion is non-existent in Ouristihra.

Connected to some of these groups and people of interest are four members of a previously extinct (that’s established further in the next book) alternate hominin species. They’re called Hybrids, and they’re born to human parents but all have a unique inhuman trait plus power over certain aspects of nature. Oddly, the Avatars of Fate start coming around about when the first of them are born.

So, we’ve got this power struggle over ArcNos with the rest of Ouristihra at risk depending on the outcome. On one side, there’s the new autonomous empire, driven by members of the Avatars of Fate. And on the other side, there’s the parliamentary republic with the help of the Hybrids. But there are spies, moles, double-crossers, informants, that sort of thing.

What drew you to write in the fantasy genre?

I’ve always had a strange imagination, so this gives me a lot of freedom. It also helps not having to do as much fact checking if I start talking about historical events, but it’s mostly the freedom to build my own cultures, characters, history, etc.

What is the hardest part of writing fantasy fiction for you?

The freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. So far, what I’ve written spans over 4 decades – some years being significantly less detailed than others, but it still impacts the canon – and covers an entire continent. That’s a lot to keep track of, ranging from personal nuances to cultural events affecting international relationships.

You’ve used the term “industrial fantasy” to describe your book. Could you expand on its meaning and elaborate on why you favour that term as opposed to say, “urban fantasy”?

I wouldn’t really call it urban fantasy, as very little of it is, well, metropolitan. The meat of it takes place in the divided capital of ArcNos, primarily among the parliamentary republic and the Hybrids. They’ve turned the Subtransit (their subway system) into their own city, thus later earning them the name the Subtransit Resistance.

But this war is fought with a combination of near-future technology and archaic weaponry like lance launchers and trebuchets. That’s due to a lack of time and funding, of course. There’s also this sort of industrial coming of age under the surface throughout it all.

You also added a few science fiction elements to the book. Did you deliberately set out to blend genres or was it simply a natural progression of the story?

Mostly a natural progression. We’re talking about different nations with different levels of development. For some outside group to be perceived as a threat in such a way as the Avatars of Fate, it would make sense for their technology to be greater than that of the most developed nations.

Plus, you have to figure the average person from a third-world country would look at our cell phones the same way we look at teleportation pods and light sabers. So, it’s also a matter of sci-fi-by-perspective.

Some of your influences range from ancient mythology to modern politics to theoretical physics and that’s quite a variety of interests. Is there a similar thread that you find in all three, something that shows in your writing?

I never thought about it – once again this was a matter of working multiple cultures and time periods into one story – but I suppose there is. Think about ancient mythology. You’ve got power struggles and hierarchal networks and conflicts comparable to those of modern politics. You just have to substitute “mortals” for “the working class.” Oh, and get rid of the arranged incest and pedocidal cannibalism. But thematically, there’s a similarity there.

Also look at the powers ascribed to many of the gods of ancient mythology. A lot of this same stuff is done in science fiction, which is rooted in theoretical physics. Sometimes vice versa. Not long ago, I read something – I think by Michio Kaku – positing that a highly advanced civilization could potentially gather a large quantity of highly condensed matter and energy, wrap it in the fabric of space, and push it outside of their universe, perhaps via a black hole.

So yeah, there are definitely similarities if you know where to look. But this was mostly a matter of blending cultures and eras in a single set of stories. Really though, politics or religion, it’s all a matter of who you pay homage to and what they promise to do for you. Also a matter of who’s real, of course.

Who are your writing inspirations?

My influences are more informational and experience-based. I might get ideas from current events or stuff I read in scientific articles. Reading Michio Kaku has given me quite a few ideas for new technology as well as origin stories behind the eventual mythology.

Are you working on another book or project?

Yes I am, in fact. I’m about 1/3 of the way through the initial draft of Into Antiquity, the second book in The Epimetheus Trial. It takes place five years after Elder Blood, but it also explores events in between the two as well as during and before Elder Blood. Hence the name, of course. I can’t divulge too much without spoiling the first book, but I will say that an old threat is resurfacing, and our characters are about to discover there’s a lot more behind it all than they anticipated. Also, where the tagline for Elder Blood is “Everyone has their secrets.” Into Antiquity is going to be “Everyone has a story.


You can check out more on Elder Blood at its Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ElderBlood

 

Interview with Philip Sharp, Author of Not in the Wind, Earthquake, or Fire

Today brings another interview, this time with writer and retired soldier Philip Sharp, who chats about his writing and his book, a non-fiction account of his tour of duty in Iraq.

Interview with Philip Sharp

Why don’t you begin by telling my readers a bit about yourself?

I was born in Elkins, WV and moved around quite a bit between there and Florida while growing up. I graduated from Apopka High School in 1990 and immediately left for the Army. In the Army I served as an Infantry soldier for 20 years where I graduated from Ranger School, completed 22 parachute jumps, and served as a Drill Sergeant. I have been to a variety of locations to include South Korea and Panama and deployed to Iraq on three separate occasions. Recently, I retired in July of this year from active duty service. Currently I am creating an all-natural farm and serving in church ministries.

Your book, Not in the Wind, Earthquake, or Fire, is historical non-fiction, an account of your second tour in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. Can you tell us how you came to write it?

Most of it was written while I was there and did not realize it at the time. I kept a journal while I was deployed throughout most of it. About a year after I returned I began to write a book to give an account from a combat soldier’s view, one that seemed to be missing at the time. At first I wrote from memory and by talking with others, but always went back to the journal to guide me. I then decided to put the journal in the book and write around it.

You served for 20 years in the US Army Infantry. Other than providing the subject matter for your book, how do you think those experiences influenced you as a writer and in the creation of your book?

Good question. I wanted this book to be from the view of an Infantry soldier. Experiencing these events as one, I believe, gives a far different outlook than you would otherwise see. The influence of my service certainly affected what and how I wrote.

What would you like people to experience from reading your book?

I would like for readers to feel, not just see, a glimpse of what combat soldiers endured in their daily lives in Iraq. It provides the experience from the best source, a first-hand account from someone on the ground. Readers will see triumphs and victories, sorrows and defeats, and an in-depth look at holding on to hope when none is easily given. Readers will get an honest and non-glossed version of the war, a recounting of its costs, and an appeal to see God in our circumstances. 

In the process of writing your book, were there any surprises, revelations or things you didn’t expect?

Oh yes! First off, it took longer than I expected. It was half written in the first place, because of the journal. It took three long years though. As I would read through my journal again it was like reliving the deployment all over again. At times I had to force my way through it. Also getting the book published was an education in itself. I paid my fair share of the fool’s tax in the process. 

You’ve also published articles and war game simulations for Strategy & Tactics magazine as well as written a column for Modern War magazine. Did you find the change from writing short articles to a book length manuscript difficult?

Writing a lengthy book is certainly more of a challenge. It is even more challenging when you are emotionally attached to the subject matter. There is certainly more editing involved and constant revisions. Formatting issues, in itself, are enough to dishearten the faint of heart. 

Now that you have written a book of non-fiction, would you ever consider writing a novel? Possibly a military thriller?

It is a possibility indeed. I have no inspirations as of yet, but could certainly use my experiences to come up with a tangible and realistic type thriller in the future.

What are some of the things you like to do when not writing?

I love tending to my plants, animals, and doing work around my place.

What are your future writing plans? Will there be more books from you?

Presently, I still write for Modern War magazine. There will probably be more books in the future, though they all may not be military in nature. I would like to write one on the basics of managing a small farm based on more natural principles. There is also desire in me to write on tactics and the training of Infantry soldiers in hopes that others will learn from our experiences, both positive and negative, and ensure our soldiers and leaders are prepared for future conflicts.

About the Author:

Philip Sharp has served for 20 years in the US Army Infantry during which he graduated from Ranger School, completed 22 parachute jumps, and served as a Drill Sergeant. He has worked in a variety of locations to include South Korea and the jungles of Panama. He deployed to Iraq three separate times from 2003 until 2010. He has published articles and war game simulations in Strategy & Tactics magazine and currently is a contributing columnist for Modern War magazine. Philip is retired from active duty service and now lives in West Virginia with his wife Heather and four children were they are creating an all-natural farm and serving in church ministries.

You can find out more about Philip and his book here:

http://www.windearthquakefire.com/

http://www.facebook.com/#!/windearthquakefire

A Guest Post: The Books of Randy Attwood

 Author Randy Attwood stops by today, to share about his books, a collection of edgy novels:

 The Books of Randy Attwood

Crazy About You

I grew up on the grounds of a Kansas mental hospital because my father was the dentist for Larned State Hospital and the State provided our housing there. You grow up around crazy people and they don't seem so bizarre to you. Seemed natural that I'd write a story based in that environment, and so Crazy About You got started. Brad Adams is going to have a week in his life that grows him up faster than he ever wanted to. Reviewers have called it a coming-of-age, young adult; some see it has a mystery/thriller. I used to get upset when people asked how much of what I wrote was true. Did they think I didn't have any imagination? Later, I realized it was a high compliment. The words on paper had created a reality for them and they thought all I was doing was describing it. That, for me, is what writing is all about: using words on paper to create a reality for the reader. They think you are just describing a reality and don't realize that the words are creating that reality.

One More Victim

I started writing the poem that ends One More Victim about 1975. It was February. I had looked out the window of the back door of our small house in Hutchinson, KS and saw crows pecking holes in our black garbage sacks.

First stanza came easy enough:

In February the crows come,

To pick though my garbage,

Make holes in the black plastic sack

And scatter its entrails over the snow.

For some reason that prompted an idea for a story that I started, and then stopped, and then went back to, and then stopped. That continued for about 25 years. And when I finished the story – turned out to be a three-part novella – the end of the poem came to me. I consider it my Heart of Darkness.

Because the Holocaust is a critical element in the plot, the story is classified as world literature, Jewish. And the few times I have offered it for free, it hit the #1 free download Amazon ranking in that category. A couple of times it has reached #92 in the paid category. I've used One More Victim as the title of a paperback POD collection that also contains "The Saltness of Time" and three short stories.

SPILL: Big Oil + Sex = Game On

SPILL is a political satire: a comedy that was written out of despair. When you write for 30 years and have such little publishing success to show for it, you do tend to doubt yourself. I thought what I was doing was pretty good, but I might be self-delusional. So I decided to write a comedy. If you made a reader laugh, the writing succeeded. I had a bar acquaintance who worked as a small-package deliveryman. He mentioned one time that his delivery that day was taking the head of a dog to the state veterinary school for rabies testing. That whole scene stuck with me. And gas prices were soaring. And I, and my whole department, had been laid off at the educational institution where I had worked for 16 years. I had the time. The SPILL wrote itself in three months. I've never written any novel that quickly. And it gave me a lot of laughs. It also secured me my agent. Haven't sold it yet, but they come close. It also got me into epublishing. I'd always thought self-publishing was an admission of failure. But a couple editors at a couple houses encouraged my agents to urge me to do SPILL an ebook. So I did, and thought, heck, why not that other stuff that's just sitting in my file cabinets. Now I have 13 works live with three more to come. Here are the first two paragraphs from SPILL:

Fred Underwood was driving his 15-year-old, once-white, now rust-speckled Nissan pickup six miles over the speed limit on his way to deliver the head of a dog to the state’s vet school for rabies testing when several things happened to him.

He saw a sign announcing—as though proud of the fact—that gasoline at the upcoming station was selling for $4.15 a gallon. He looked into the rear view mirror when he heard a siren and confirmed that, indeed, a police car was chasing him. He uttered, “Shit,” but then felt his body swept with euphoria: an idea smacked him that would make him rich.

Rabbletown: Life in These United Christian States of Holy America

Long before 1984 arrived, I had a dream of writing a novel called 2084. I constructed long biographies and future histories to show how by the time 2084 arrived the religious right would have taken complete power over America and rule her with a Bible in each fist. I thought it would be a long book and be told in tales from various decades. And it came to nothing. Again it showed me that outlining was no use for me; it actually hindered my writing. But I had a beginning segment of a mason returning home after a 14 hour day working on construction a huge cathedral for the Church of the Evangels, who ruled America. I finally just continued with that opening scene show what life was like for Bob and his wife and their 14 children, one of them Bobby, who had an amazing memory for Bible verses.

Here's that opening scene for Rabbletown:

Bob Crowley, drunk and very tired, almost tripped over the broken toy truck before kicking it out of his way then trudging around the side of the house to the back of a former duplex that now housed six families of 50-some Christian souls. Work on the Great Christian State of Kansas Cathedral went on from dawn to dusk, almost a 14-hour, hot, summer day. After Bob had made the long climb back to the ground, he stopped at one of the small booze-holes at the edge of Rabbletown to drink its oily-smelling, stomach-wrenching, blessedly mind-numbing alcohol before going home. Now, in the doorway to his basement apartment, he burped and smelled the sour acid of his empty stomach. Pulling the burlap sack of tools off his shoulder and dropping it to the floor when he entered, the noise of his own household assaulted him. The twins came, screaming their welcome, and he picked the bag of tools back up, swung, and caught one of them on the side of the head, sending him sprawling sideways and setting up a wail of tears and pain that caused his wife to yell, “Stop beatin’ the kids, will ya?”

“Well keep the little retards away from me.”

Doesn't sound like a pleasant, Christian household does it?

Blow Up the Roses

I have never known the end of a story when I start it. It seems knowing the end is a fraud upon the reader. I start with a scene, or an idea, or a character, and then learn about the characters and follow what they do. When I found out the horror of what Mrs. Keene's renter was doing in Blow Up the Roses, I almost just quit writing it. But some characters demand their existence: this serial, pedophile killer tied me to my chair and extracted words from me as sure as blood from his victims. Blow Up the Roses is being published by Curiosity Quills and should soon be available as a paperback POD and an ebook. The language of flowers can be brutally frank.

Here's the chilling opening scene:

Mr. Brown closed the door on the whimpers and walked up the stairs to take a shower. He stood under the stream of water and leaned his head against the wall of the shower stall. "Mommy loves me. Mommy loveth me. Mommy loveth me," he whispered to himself as his heart slowed. Those pictures should really be something, he thought to himself. As good as these stills would be, though, he knew there was no way they would show the wriggling. That's what he loved, how they wriggled trying to get away from him. The audio cassette tape he supplied with the pictures made quite a package, but it was time to get into video-taping. He could invest some of the profits from the stills in good equipment. He already had the lights. If only he had a partner. But who could you trust in a thing like this? Sure there were plenty of others out there, if the way his distributor bought his picture-cassette tape packages were any guide, but how could you find one you could trust to work the camera? He'd just have to find some way to rig the camera in a static position. If he could afford it, he could buy about three cameras and ring the area, then splice the tape. He could be as careful as he was with the still pictures and the cassettes to ensure that nothing in them identified him. Maybe they offered some lessons on video tape splicing at the community college. They taught everything else there.

He reached for the soap, brought it to a lather in his hands, and then washed the blood from his penis.

You can check out Randy's books on Amazon

Guest Post: Three Things I Never Expected to Do with My Creative Writing Degree

Today another guest, Angelita Williams, pops by to share some of her writing experience:

3 Things I Never Expected to Do with My Creative Writing Degree

Every year, thousands of students across the country flock to colleges and universities in pursuit of higher education. Some pursue degrees in science, others study math and then there's the few who gravitate toward the writing and literary disciplines. I, myself, was part of that last group when I was a student fresh out of high school. All my life I had loved to write, so declaring a major in creative writing seemed like a no-brainer.

Sure, I heard all the horror stories and warnings about choosing such a non-specific field, but what did I care? I was 18 and ready to take on the world. All that job stuff would figure itself out later, I had learning and living to do. Besides, why would I force myself to switch to a major like engineering or accounting when all of my friends studying those subjects were downright miserable all of the time?

So I stuck it out, and graduated right on time with a pristine creative writing degree in hand. As many graduates are, I was a mess of mixed emotions—part excited, part relieved and part TERRIFIED about my future. Compared to the friends I mentioned before who pursued more traditional paths, I was a bit directionless when I graduated. They all had jobs lined up, or knew exactly what grad schools they'd be going to, but I, on the other hand was still desperately applying for any job I could find that even remotely required my writing skills.

Luckily it all worked out, but little did I know then that I would end up happy in a lucrative job doing what I love. I held a lot of random jobs, missed a few opportunities and did some downright strange things before I made it, and just want the college students and recent grads of today to realize that.

Below is a list of three of the most unexpected things I did before I got to this point in my career.

Helped Cover Up a Corporate Scandal

Since it's the one I'm probably least proud of, I figured I'd better get it out of the way first. For a brief stint right out of college, I landed a job with one of the largest engineering firms in the world at the time. I was hired as a writer/editor for their communications department and, although I wasn't exactly a fan of what the company did, I loved my specific job. I spent the majority of my days editing marketing materials, writing and researching articles and interviewing industry-leading decision makers, all to help develop promotional content.

Sure I couldn't get too creative, but I was getting paid to write—and getting paid well at that. Ask anyone who longs to be a writer and they already know a not-so-impressive paycheck comes with the territory. So I definitely felt I had hit the jackpot, until I started noticed some questionable things going on around the office.

Executives were always on edge. Our media relations department was working around the clock and we all started receiving random inquiries from outside parties—journalists, lawyers, the like. Turns out, one of our big wigs had been engaging in some less-than-legal activities during his time overseas, and there was evidence to prove it.

Suddenly, instead of writing about project updates or community activities, I was drafting damage control press releases, engaging in media training and deliberately omitting details from documents in the interest of the company. The stress finally got to me and I threw in the towel, because ethically, I knew what I was doing was wrong.

I was using my writing skills to mislead the public all for the sake of the mighty dollar, disgust doesn't even begin to describe what I felt toward myself. So, I cut my ties with the company and to this day know it was the right thing to do. Talk about an unexpected job. Thankfully the others are much more entertaining and less gut-wrenching.

Write for a Number-One Radio Show

Shortly after my stint in Corporate America, I found myself working for one of the biggest media groups in my city. They owned several radio stations and even an ad firm, and I worked in their promotions department. My primary job was to assist with events and giveaways the stations coordinated, until one day I was asked to fill in as a "sidekick" during a live broadcast. The host's usual partner had gotten unexpectedly sick and they needed a female voice to go over the air. Being the only girl in the area that was employed by the company they threw me a set of headphones and a microphone and shoved me on-air.

The broadcast wasn't exactly smooth at first, but as it progressed I got more comfortable and subsequently let my personality shine through. The host was impressed, but more importantly so was the program director. Later that week he arranged a meeting with me and told me to stop wasting my time in the promotions department. He felt I had raw talent and real wit that their top-rated morning show could use.

So the next week, I was working from 4 in the morning until noon, writing show content, interview questions and more for the city's number-one radio show. It was such a whirlwind. I couldn't believe that not even a month ago I was lugging around station equipment and now my words that I had WRITTEN were being heard by thousands of people all around me. To say I was thrilled would be an understatement.

At the time, if I had had my choice I would have stayed there forever, but unfortunately, as is the nature of that business, my run was shorter than I would have liked. The show eventually lost its draw and ratings slipped. Before I knew it contracts weren't being renewed and my professional future was once again up in the air. I eventually lost my job, but the company offered me a part-time position so that I could stick around in case something else opened up. However, I knew then and there this was NOT an industry I wanted to stay with. Sure it was fun while it lasted, but I could never see myself continuously dealing with that sort of instability and uncertainty , which brings me to my next position.

Draft Text Messages for My Boss

After my stint with radio, I decided I was much better suited for an average, everyday desk job. Sure radio was exciting, but I knew I needed to be somewhere stable for my growing family. So I took a job as a personal assistant for a very rich, very old oil executive. At first, the bulk of my work centered around scheduling and memos—then he decided to get a smartphone.

Some of you might be thinking this is great, good for him for embracing technology. Only problem was I was the one who got stuck with the task of teaching him how to use it. During my time there he never really caught on, but that was no surprise to me. A majority of my days would be spent with his phone in hand, typing out texts as he dictated them to me—yeah, exciting I know. I had a hard time believing this guy was for real. But, I guess when you've got that much money you don't really care anymore.

Needless to say that job didn't exactly work out either. I quit shortly after that and now find myself here, doing what I love—writing.

This piece is not meant to deter future students from pursuing their passions, but rather serve as a window into reality. No, you will likely not land that perfect job right after college and no, you will not make an amazing salary right off the bat, but with a little persistence and hard work you just might be able to do what you love for a living. Isn't that what we're all after anyway?


Angelita Williams is a freelance writer and education enthusiast. She strives to instruct her readers and enrich their lives and welcomes you to contact her at angelita.williams7@gmail.com if you have any questions or comments.