Well, nearly fifty. My radio series scripts were written in 1970. I used manual typewriters in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Allenwood, San Francisco, Sydney, Mill Valley and Cazadero, most of them little portables, a couple of Selectrics and IBM Executives on occasion. More than once, I had to use pencil and paper. Photocopiers were terrible back then, thin slick thermal paper that faded to nothing in a few weeks. Carbon paper was more durable, but you had to really bang the typewriter keys and mistakes were a tedious mess to correct with a hard ink eraser and a stiff little brush. I bought a lot of Liquid Paper. A fresh bottle was good for about a week and then it got thick and stringy, no matter how quickly you screwed the cap shut.
Useful personal computers came along in the mid-80s. Some of my best stuff at the time was written on an 8086 laptop that used floppies, no fonts, no bold, no italics. I wrote a show for IBM that was composed on an Osborne, had a dinky screen that you had to scroll left and right to see a whole line of text. The Amiga was considered a breakthrough. You could feed video through it, do captions and titles, draw stuff, animate it (sort of), and use it like a typewriter with a line printer, endless folds of perforated paper fed by a tractor. Floppies were smaller and slightly more durable, had hard shells. Still no internet. There was a tug of war between Betamax and VHS in America, plus a Philips cassette in Europe that you could turn over and record on both sides. Pro video was a chaos of 3/4" and three incompatible 1" open reel "C" formats. Studios in Australia were still using 2" quad tape. All audio was analog. I mention it because I was doing more film and video production than creative writing at the time.
Then I found myself sitting in a cubicle at Disney, spending Mickey's money to master home video product on D1 and D2, and I realized that my career in Hollywood was kaput. My movie scripts made it as far as the Development Committee at Columbia and got voted down 4-3 , vetoed by bosses at PSO, Kingman, and DeLaurentiis. Lyle Alzedo got sick and died, so my star vehicle for Lyle died, too. No matter what I pitched, the answer was always no. I decided to write books. The first one was written on an old portable Underwood by gaslight on a ranch that had no electric power. Oddly enough, it was published and did fairly well, a reference book with a humorous take on concepts and doctrines that ended in "ism." Decades later, I found a copy in a Colorado library, opened it and hung my head in dismay, wished that I had done a much better job. Writers mature slowly. My first novel took a long time to get right, twenty years from first draft to a third revision that actually makes sense, flows better.
As I became a better author, the market shrank. Book publishers consolidated or went out of business. Worse, as I gained control of my literary vision and a signature style, the world went bezerk with Political Correctness. Chicks, gays, and "people of color" were celebrated, straight white guys blackballed. I stretched my brain to grasp print on demand. My first few books covers were terrible, and I was completely baffled when it came to promotion. I sold no books. I gave up, segued to financial writing for Seeking Alpha and a business magazine in Abu Dhabi, did some writing for hire in the oil patch, helped new screenwriters at Zoetrope, self published a couple of nonfiction titles and wasted money at Kirkus and O Desk, shipped review copies hither and yon, and plugged my work on internet forums, all for naught.
Four years ago, I found a small plot of forest and pasture in the Ozarks, cleared a site at the top of a hill and built a house that my wife designed. When it was finished, I set up a little writing office in an old tin barn and began to write again, egged on by a talented novelist in New Mexico and an equally talented short story author in California, people I admired. The result was five new novels and five nonfiction titles, self published and handled with more confidence at Lulu, CreateSpace, Smashwords, and KDP. Books sales were slow, but I had forged an authorial voice that was natural to me. Fifty years of writing paid off in the sense that I could not be mistaken for anyone else, a unique storyteller, ruthless and expressive, unafraid to show and tell what happens between hard men and the women who love them. It doesn't matter, can't matter what other people write, whether I'm ignored or reviled. I'm too old to care, nearing the end of life. Fifty years of cigarette smoking has a price.
There is no undoing it. Not after such a gruelling uphill climb to a summit of my own, over a million words that had to be hammered like pitons on a sheer stone wall, no one to catch me if I fell.
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