Five years ago, if you had told me that someone would pay me to write anything, I would have thought that you were crazy. The way that life has pushed me towards this endeavor in so many ways has been remarkable to experience and dare I say almost magical to do. Circumstances have moved me to find my voice and my passion through writing. It is not the easiest of ventures but I think that it is the one I was meant to follow at least for now.
The Problem with My Education
One of the reasons that I think I moved away from writing for so many years was that from the earliest days of my schooling I had two majour problems, I had poor penmanship and I didn’t like rules. The poor penmanship seems trite, but the educational environment I experienced made it a real issue, and I think that much of the substance of a story or the thought behind it was ever obstructed by the unwieldy and messy mode of delivery I could provide. How many times as a child can you be criticized about something before you move away from it completely? About a thousand is my guess. I am not complaining or feeling sorry for myself here, because I recognize the entire journey leads to the right destination, but this is one of the explanations that pushed me away from writing anything, ever, for anyone.

As for rules, I don’t think anyone likes them, but I like them even less when it comes to writing. If the proper formation of words and punctuation gave words their power to impress, motivate, or inspire then I would freely submit to this point, however it is not even the least bit true. The power of the written word comes from the thoughts and emotions that motivate the words. Yes I concede that I was given the rudimentary background for creating cohesive sentences, but  with that concession comes the acceptance of responsibility of our educational system, spending too much time on form and format and not enough time on appreciating and encouraging creativity and original thought.
Losing My Overly Critical voice
For much of my life, I think that whenever I wrote anything, there was a voice in my mind that always pointed out the weaknesses of that

writing. It is too sappy, too long, too intricate, too personal. You name a criticism and that voice made it. I always worried about how a word or a phrase would be read and accepted by someone else rather than if it truly expressed the thoughts that I was having. Like most people I think that often times I would deem my work foolishness and destroy it. Thousands of thoughts have met their demise in this manner, and I am not sure if it ever would have changed if I hadn’t needed money and decided to enter the world of freelance writing. People hire you to create content, usually around keywords, for their websites. For anyone who has ever investigated making money online, the creation of quality content is a huge undertaking.
I accepted a job in which I had to produce large volumes of articles quickly and under a deadline of 48 hours. At first it really brought out all of the emotions I had about writing, from following rules to writing things that I thought sucked, but being under deadline they had to be good enough. As I worked from day to day, creating written articles about every different topic you can imagine and miraculous thing began to happen, that critical voice started to disappear, the more I wrote, the less I heard from it. I think that the total emersion in writing began to make many more thoughts come to me and need to be expressed. The fear facto of what anybody else thinks of those thoughts is now a distant memory, and all I seem to need is the time to write and some thought to write about. That is a feeling of freedom and expression that I have never felt before. It is truly amazing.
Many Stories to Tell
So here I am at the beginning of a journey that I am tentatively beginning, there are many stories that I feel the need to tell, stories about my life which need to be expressed to tales of imaginary people and things that have no substance as of yet because they only exist in my mind.