How I became a writer

If you would have told me back in 1970 that one day I would be a published author, I would have told you, “Those are fighting words.”

Really, I hated writing throughout high school and college. I hated it so much that I took nine extra courses and went the non-thesis route for my master’s degree.

So what changed? I was working a 6PM to 6AM shift in an Air Force command post one night in the spring of 1984. I was bored. I picked up a Reader’s Digest and read a story about the Civil War. In the article it mentioned that the Union forces used balloons to observe the confederate camps to estimate troop strength. I was struck by the idea that this could have been the beginnings of my Air Force profession. I was a Navigator-Observer.

The story peeked my interest so much that I went to the library and checked out four Bruce Catton books and read everything I could find on the Union Aeronautical-Observation Corps. This led to my first published article in The Navigator Magazine, called The First Observers.

Over the next year, I caught the writing bug and published three more articles in Air Force magazines.