Walt at Random

Hmm. Tagged by Chris Armstrong (who linked to an announcement-only “blog”). I was hoping to evade this particular meme, partly because my life’s been pretty open, with few mysteries of even the slightest interest.

But, what the hey, it’s almost winter solstice, so here are five really boring revelations…

1. I am seriously fond of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, which I first discovered on a cruise (true), and which I only read when traveling–which means I’m only through the first dozen or so, with around a dozen waiting to be read.
2. The one time I tried writing fiction was as a teenager. I wrote a science fiction short story and submitted it to Astounding (now Analog). I got a surprisingly kind handwritten rejection note from John W. Campbell, Jr., encouraging me to try again. Later, I looked at the short story objectively…and let’s just say I’ve never tried writing fiction again, and don’t plan to start.
3. As a youth, I was mildly traumatized by being suckered encouraged by a relative to go to what was supposed to be a Methodist week-long “camp”–and turned out to be a Free Methodist camp. If you don’t know the difference, a little research might help. Let’s say the fun began when they seized my Revised Standard Version Bible at the gate, informed me that it was written by Communists, and substituted the Bible as Dictated Directly by God to King James. Things got worse from there…
4. In my junior year of high school (same school and class as George Lucas, but I never knew him in high school or since), I was part of a group who–disgusted with the quality of the school’s newspaper–started a rebel newspaper, typeset and all. I believe it was called “Etc.” but could be mistaken. We put out four issues, if I remember correctly, somehow raising the funds (partly by advertising) to cover the typesetting and printing. That group then joined the journalism class in senior year, took over the official newspaper–and it won a regional award the year we ran it. So I do have a background in doing out-of-the-ordinary publications.
5. My academic “career” basically concluded when a professor in grad school gave the following comment on the major paper for a course (on 17th century British political rhetoric), paraphrased: “Excellent writing, awful research. Maybe you don’t belong here.” I never thanked him for the excellent advice.

Now, as for tagging…well, there are roughly a dozen blogs in all from OCLC employees. I’ll say “any five OCLC bloggers who wish to participate,” and leave it at that. And if none of you do, that’s OK too.

This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.