Another
in a series of coming of age stories.
It makes me jealous when I read about writers who can
look back on the words they wrote that became a turning point—and propelled
them into the wild blue yonder as authors.
You know the scenario. “At the age of six the poem for
her dying grandmother flowed from Jessica’s mouth and her father immediately enrolled
her in Breadloaf.”
Sadly, I did not fall in love with writing at an
early age. But I did fall in love with the Woodstock typewriter my father kept at
home. The sound still echoes, reverberates—no, clashes like symbols—in my ears.
CLICKETY CLACK. CLACKETY CLICK
When you got a group of them together in a typing
pool or the newsroom of my father’s office, it was pure music. It was a chorus
of snare drums with the zing of little bells when they reached the end of the
page and you pulled the carriage back.
CLICKETY CLACK. CLACKETY CLICK. ZING. ZING. ZING.
I wrote a couple of short stories in college along
with some gutsy editorials as editor of the campus newspaper. And all during my
two years in the Army following the Korean War I kept a diary filled with
adventurous details that would underlay the next Great American Novel—when I
ever got around to writing it.
CLICKETY CLACK. CLACKETY CLICK.
By now I was writing on a Smith-Corona portable.
Which would eventually be replaced by the keypad of my computer and it’s polite
little sound like a cat waltzing on ice. But even today with seven novels under
my belt I can’t get that sound out of my head.
CLICKETY CLACK. CLACKETY CLICK.
The sound of pure inspiration. The sound of pure ecstasy.
Maybe it explains why I write about investigative reporters and their
adventures in tracking down serial killers.
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