First Thoughts

Welcome to both of us! For you, this is a new adventure (you hope as much as I do). For me, this is no less an adventure, although I have been in my journey for a little while now.

What prompted me to begin a Blog? What is this Blog about? Why should you care? Who is Dominic? What makes him special? Why is there a government car out in front of your house now?

Okay, so you might care about some of those questions, but not all of them. I get it. Let me fast forward to the parts that I can explain.

First of all, if the government has a car in front of your house, it is not my fault. I have done nothing to no one at no time in no place that I am aware of. So that government sedan must be looking into something more related to you than to me.

The other questions have answers that would be best explained by me telling you about the last year of my life as well as some other background elements. After that I'll come back and clarify anything that I might have missed.

Last April I was informed that my services were no longer required at my employer. We both knew that a separation was on the horizon, but it still caught me off-guard. I scrambled to find something new so that my wife and, at the time, one year old son would not be impacted. In hindsight, I wonder if my muses were working overtime to get me on track.

Over the next two months, my life shifted. The Monday afterward, I had the interview which lead to my current employer. I started two weeks later. Learning a new job challenged me, mostly because I was setting up their first formal Human Resources department. It was easier and tougher than I expected, but it has been a much better environment. I realized how much stress my former job had placed on my family and me and began to decompress. One afternoon, I realized that I had a great job, my family was doing well, and yet I felt something was missing.

Several days later, I stumbled on Writing.com. The website provides a forum for writers at all levels and all interests to be able to make their work available to others, whether for critiques or just to know it is being read. A few days later, I wrote my first story in about ten years. It was short and took less than five minutes to write, but it was the first step.

For six months I wrote a few short stories a week, often with glaring gaps in the story, but that was fine. My desire then was simple. I wanted to write to express myself. But something else developed during that time.

Initially my stories got comments like, 'Nice, but something was missing' and 'I didn't understand it, but had fun reading it'. Some contests I entered routinely gave me reviews, but few wins. Overall, the comments were that I had a problem keeping in the same tense and was not providing a complete plot.

I changed things. I reread and learned from the feedback. My writing improved.

By November I was getting comments like, 'Wow! I loved this! You should make it longer.' and 'Are you working on a longer piece like this? I would be interested in reading it, even if it cost me a little money.' On the contest front, I had weeks where I submitted as many as eight short stories and won 80-90% of them. On one occassion I was even told that I didn't win because I had won so many others recently.

These comments watered a seed which had been germinating since High School. That seed was the idea that I could write professionally. Over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, the idea kept coming to the surface, but I kept squashing it. Then January came around.

January in Human Resources is notoriously slow. I wrapped up a few projects and assignments in the early part of the month and found myself increasingly searching for new tasks. One afternoon, I began scribbling out ideas for a story. Part of the idea was initially submitted to a Writing.com contest and got numerous comments as well as winning for that day. The idea grew though.

For a week I pondered where the story was going. Abreviating the doubts and worries, I eventually decided to extend the story and try for publication. This story became my first submission to the Writers of the Future contest in March of 2007.

I made up my mind to get my work published and pursue the dream of professional writing. For now I am focussed on the Science Fiction and Fantasy markets, although I could see expeditions into different markets later. And that story is what this Blog is about.

This is going to be my journal. This is going to be my record of the journey. Would you like to join me for the ride? You're invited.