First, I want to say hello to everyone out there and wish you the best in your writing adventure. As the title says I am a 57 yo disabled veteran. I served in the US Navy on ballistic missile submarines as a Navigation Electronics Technician from 1986-1997. Now I am retired living in the PacificNorthwest with my wife. Throughout my life I have always wanted to write a big successful sci-fi or fantasy epic. I grew up in Northwest Florida, on the Gulf Coast. The town was small, so I didn’t have much to do for fun and being the youngest boy and second youngest in a family with five kids I had to entertain myself. The nearest movie theater was an hour and a half away so that was not something we did. I didn’t see Star Wars until 1980 when it was shown in school. I read the novelization of Star Wars that I picked up at a school book-fair while my friends were seeing the movie. I did a lot of reading back then and spent a lot of time in my imagination. I have been writing off and on over the years and went through different phases. For a period of time, I wrote poetry. I don’t have any of my old writing so I cannot share examples, nor can I compare my writing now to back then. I do know my poetry was not bad; at least that was what my girlfriend at the time said. During my time in the Navy my writing slowed down and changed. How did it change? The Navy tends to want paperwork written in a professional non-emotional way. Let’s just say as my writing improved Navy wise it suffered in the creativity area. Now after raising two children, getting divorce, remarried, and jumping through hoops for my disability, I have decided to get back to writing sci-fi and fantasy. I still want to publish a great work, but I am difficulty overcoming a few things. Let set aside my age for the moment even though it is an issue. Let’s get straight to the biggest problem. I am an introvert. Ok, it is larger than that. I have PTSD acquired from two major events in my life. The first, I was hung, lynched actually, by a bully and his friends from a jungle gym in the 5th grade. Why? Because my brother liked a girl the bully liked and because I was a “Yankee”. I was born in Ohio, and the bully was raised to believe “The south shall rise again.” I am white by the way. Talk about traumatic, that incident was. The second incident happened in the Navy. On the second submarine I served I discovered a group of racists who were plotting to keep a person of Filipino descent from qualifying watch standing and get him kicked out of the service. Their reasoning was since he was not white, he was not intelligent enough to run the equipment. I brought this up to the division chief and the next thing I knew I was getting death threats and notes telling me to kill myself left in my bunk. On Submarines you “rack” is your private space, safe space, and it was violated. From then on, I felt like whenever I went on patrol I was going to die. It never got better and lead to depression. Anyway, now I have trouble putting myself out there fearing if I do, I will be attacked. This makes it hard for me to approach people for help or finding a query agent. I joined this forum to gain insight and see if someone may have a suggestion or two. Right now, I am sitting on a fantasy manuscript of 89,000. I am already 30,000 words into writing the second book in the series. Then there is an unfinished sci-fi manuscript at 50,000 words waiting for me to come back to and finish. Anyway, that is me, but not all of me. Thanks for reading. Charles
Hello and welcome Charles, thank you for sharing a bit about yourself in the intro. We're glad you've joined us. Please make yourself at home, and we're looking forward to seeing you in the forums.
Welcome, Charles. I'm sorry to hear about your traumas. Have you considered writing stories about them? Writing down painful events can be slightly healing for the soul. (Though best worked out with a professional.) When I wrote my first book, I included a traumatic event for the main character that was very similar to an event I suffered. I then rewrote the book and the scene so it wasn't the same. But I still kept the old file. I also write sci-fi. Don't be afraid to share your work here in the workshop, we are generally a friendly bunch. And the workshop is for members only. Hope you find the place to your liking.
Hello and welcome to the forum, Charles. Please feel free to ask any questions and seek any help, or share your writing. You won't be judged here - we're all here to help one another. I hope we can assist!
Madman is right. After my nervous breakdown, I kept a journal to try to explain to myself what was happening. The journal was therapeutic. Salman Rushdie just wrote a book on the assassination attempt on his life, as a way of sorting out what had happened to him and putting it into perspective. It's called Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. I suggest you look up the book. Following his example, I just finished writing about a catastrophe in my own life. Although it was over sixty years ago and therefore not exactly fresh in my mind, I wrote it as an exercise to help me sort out what happened with what might have happened, before it all fuses together.
