The 5th of September is a day I pause and think about my writing life.
Because on September 5th in 2006, I offered my first entry at my Monkey Mind blog.
It requires both fingers and toes to do the math, but I believe that was eighteen years ago. It of course is not the only marker in that writing life, but it is the date I’ve written down in my calendar.
I always wanted to write. From adolescence I knew writing would be a significant part of my life. How, exactly, I didn’t have a clue. I wrote some short stories. As best I can recollect, they were all execrable. I recall getting form rejections from Reader’s Digest for humorous anecdotes I sent them.
When I was a young Zen monk I ghosted the preface to the first edition of Jiyu Kennett’s Selling Water by the River in 1972. It was my first writing to appear in a book.