In 1970 I left Toronto and went to Europe to set off for Europe to see the world. I met a man who became my husband who brought me to California. What are the odds of that?
Had fate not intervened I suspect I would have gone back to Toronto or even my home town, a middling-size city of not much importance in northern Ontario.
Would I have become a writer? I could always string together words in a way that people found interesting, writing reports, letters, this and that. It was a time when public education was more thorough than it is now. I couldn’t believe there were people in high school who couldn’t read. I thought everybody could write, so it wasn’t a skill I imagined was worth much.
Fate kept twining my path with people who took writing fiction seriously. I stood at the edges, admiring what they did. I’ve always been a serious reader and knew what good fiction sounded like, but I never had a story that insisted I write it.
As a research worker at the University of Southern California, an opportunity to get a MFA degree was free, so there must have been some hard wind behind me. I worked hard to get that degree. But no degree can give you a work ethic and the ability to apply seat of pants to chair for long periods of time.
That was the beginning of the hard work to teach myself how to write: four finished practice novels that no one wanted to publish.
Fate intruded again when I turned my sights on crime fiction. And as the Robert Frost says, “that has made all the difference.”
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Now I write about writing: Please check out my six EBooks on Writing Your First Mystery.
Recommend them to a beginning or intermediate crime fiction writer.
What a wonderfully romantic story about fate and how it can affect our lives. I'm glad it touched yours for the better.
Posted by: Michael A. Black | September 07, 2017 at 05:19 PM
Well, sadly, he up and died on me. But I will always be grateful to him.
Posted by: Mar Preston | September 07, 2017 at 06:20 PM