Give Yourself a Kick in the Pants

By Mike Morris

Writing is more than a hobby and more than a way of making a living. It's a fresh start, a new way of looking at things, and it can be a kick in the pants that propels the author into uncharted territory. Most of the readers of this newsletter are established writers, and all of you, I think, are open to change and innovation. I started writing after a major change in lifestyle, but since I became a writer, I have found that all changes, big and small, for better or worse, inspire me to write.

We don't have to climb mountains, or boldly go where no one has been before, but we do need, I believe, to be open to all of life's ups and downs. I started writing when I opened up to all the challenges humans have to face. I have since broadened the scope of my writing by embracing change and even adversity to drive my creativity. It's not easy, and I haven't always managed to pull it off, but when it works it's worth any amount of pressure.

I always wanted to be a writer, but very early on there were four kids and lots of expenses and we all liked to travel so we immigrated to the good old USA. After that, there was hard work and good times, and somewhere along the way the kids grew up. In 1990, when I returned to my roots on an eighteen month contract to Harrogate in the north of England, I hadn't written a thing, other than program specs and a few letters, in thirty years.

The United Kingdom was strange to me. I felt lost between two worlds. I realized that Britain was no longer my home, and yet I still didn't feel like an American. I tried to keep away from the pubs at lunchtime, and one slow day at noon, I tossed down my printout and stared at the wall. It had been raining for a whole month in Harrogate. I started thinking about Los Angeles, and the beach at Santa Monica, and the warm, soft sunlight washing across pastel houses. "Lotus land," I thought. I slid a yellow pad towards me. "A limey in lotus land," I wrote, underlining twice.

Then I started writing. I wrote about the way the city glittered as the plane swooped down to LAX. I wrote about the interview at the restaurant with two earnest gentlemen who plied me with food and enthusiasm, and who thought my awful accent was great. I wrote about the impossible missed deadlines of the job, the continually renewed enthusiasm and optimism, the mountains of supplies, and the beach at Santa Monica. I wrote faster and faster, and a few minutes after one, I was done.

For the price of a pub lunch, a friendly secretary typed the article for me, and I sent it off to Computer Contractor, a British magazine. Not long after, I received a very professional letter, with blank invoices, an agreement, and a check for £90, just as if I was a real writer. And at that moment, it dawned on me that I was a real writer. I've been writing ever since, and what I write is, I hope, improved by all the changes and challenges that I embrace and overcome.

I made the cover of that magazine. I have that cover framed, even though the background picture was of San Francisco, not Los Angeles. That first sale meant more to me than anything I've ever done, anywhere.

Mike Morris lives in the US, but was born and raised in the UK, where he worked in the factories and foundries in the "Black Country" of the industrial midlands. Britain was pretty drab after World War II, and he spent most of his early life cleaning dirt from under his nails and watching high-energy American movies. You might say that Gene Kelly and Doris Day invited him over here. He learned data processing for the sole purpose of emigrating. He’s always wanted to write, but started late. He makes a full-time living from it, if you include technical writing. He has, however, published many articles and several stories.

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