Once upon a time I noticed how many great come-backs I could invent on the day after the confrontation. After weeks of deliberation I decided to take that as a sign from heaven that I was being groomed to become a writer. I began recording them and one morning I woke up to the realization that I needed a book to put all of them in. 37 years later it was published. Since then the only legitimate complaint I have had about being a writer is the lack of discretionary funds right at Christmas time.
One strange personality quirk I have noticed in virtually all the writers I have known is their reticence I have owned a group on LinkedIn called Children's book writers for several years now. On one finger I can count the number of writers with something good to say about themselves! That one writer has 31 wildly successful titles and is happily involved in the process of pounding out several more.
Long ago I decided to break that trend of natural reticence by preparing an elevator speech in advance, just in case anyone ever wanted to know more about me. Here is how it went -- "I am sweet, kind, generous, gentle, and looking for someone to boss around."
After a few years I decided to add a second line to that. "You can put complete trust in every piece of advice I give because my strongest desire in life is to straighten you out."
Of course I had to give up both of those speeches when I actually had a book to sell.
Fortunately there are three other anecdotes that tell what I am really like.
- I've always been a day dreamer. One day I was dreaming at the table when suddenly my mother knocked me clean out of my chair and up against the wall. Her finger shook in front of my startled eyes as she snapped, "Boy, didn't you hear me nod?"
- Just
before my 10th birthday I was in my first gun battle. I had
convinced a Native American boy how much fun it would be to sneak up
on a group of four Euro-merican quail hunters and spring an Indian
joke on them by leaping up out of the bushes in front of them,
honking like geese and flopping our arms for takeoff.
As luck would have it, as I began the process of leaping up from our shallow bar ditch, my hand gently jostled a bush in front of me. An instantaneous burst of hot lead came sizzling through that bush. We had inadvertently triggered a frontal assault.
My friend decided to explain the "Indian Joke" to them at some later date and I seconded that emotion with subtle alacrity. In our haste to leave the area undisturbed we disturbed a few other bushes at strategic points along our flight path. “There they go, SHOOT!”
Shoot they did.
Behind us there erupted screams and shouts and loud explosions that provided us with a further power-packed impetus to leave the Reservation while our age of early innocence was still intact. Our sporadic engagement subsequently developed into a RUNNING gun battle.
At the end of that bar ditch there was a five strand barbed wire fence. My friend was running so fast at that point that he sailed horizontally through that fence without grazing the strand above him or snagging the one below him.
Ordinarily I would have paused to argue that the human body cannot be traveling fast enough on foot to achieve escape velocity. However, on this occasion I simply duplicated his death-defying feat and left science behind me to dispute the evidence as best it could.
- One of my employers complained that I had too many experiences to pack into one life so short. "Listen," I responded. "I didn't come down here to be bored to death!"
Now, read some of my available books. http://www.amazon.com/author/linstone/
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