The Making of a Writer: My Plan

Me, 2003

The summer after fourth grade I made my mother take me to the public library so I could photocopy the pages of The Writer's Market that described mystery magazines. My plan was to write a few mystery stories, send them off to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine or Ellery Queen, and enter fifth grade a published author.

That was my plan.

You're probably way ahead of me on this, but not only did I not publish any stories that summer, I didn't even finish writing any.

So much for the plan.

The Making of a Writer: More Plans

But I never stopped wanting to be a writer. It's something I've been working on ever since that trip to the library thirty years ago, both in the classroom (I have a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Professional Writing, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing) and at the typewriter (I've published somewhere around twenty short stories and poems in various places, and I have completed the manuscripts of two novels and have two others in progress).

I also teach English at the college level—while I was getting my M.F.A. at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, I was a Teaching Fellow and taught English 1101, English 1102, World Literature, and Business Communications. I continued to teach there for a while as an adjunct English instructor. Now I teach English at Georgia Perimeter College.

The Making of a Writer: Stuff Having Nothing to Do With Being a Writer

I was born in 1967—the year the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; the year John Coltrane died; the year Woodstock first appeared in the Peanuts comic strip; the year that filming began on Planet of the Apes.

I stand five-feet six-inches tall (coincidentally, the approximate height of both Groucho Marx and Woody Allen), I have dark hair and brown eyes, and I wear glasses. I drive a Suzuki Aerio, I tend to favor RC Cola and Moon Pies, and my favorite color is either khaki or plaid. I live in Loganville, Georgia, with my wife, Anna, our young daughter, Jessica, and our six cats: Seuss, Lilly, Jupiter, Tesseract, Luna, and Josey.

Me, 1988

Before I quit my corporate job to venture into the world of academia, I worked for fourteen years in the computer training industry, primarily as a technical writer or editor (though I also did stints as a product development manager, systems analyst, and Web developer, among other things). I worked for eleven years for ExecuTrain Corporation and three years for MeasureUp, Inc., during which time I wrote and/or edited dozens of computer training manuals and even more computer-based practice tests with such exciting titles as Introduction to Pagemaker, Access 95 Application Development, and Designing a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and Network Infrastructure.

More Stuff Having Nothing to Do With Being a Writer

I have a number of passions, including: science fiction and fantasy, especially the SF of the thirties, forties, and fifties (Clifford D. Simak is one of my favorites, and I have a small collection of Startling Stories magazines); children's and young adult literature (my great ambition is to write for kids and young adults; Louis Sachar and Jerry Spinelli are among my idols); the modern American short story (currently I'm reading Andre Dubus, T.C. Boyle, and George Singleton); good 70s TV shows (“Night Gallery,” “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” “Kung Fu,” “Columbo,” “The Rockford Files,” “M*A*S*H”); the work of Jack Webb (I could watch “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” all day); haunting good bookstores; collecting portable manual typewriters; roadside archeology (especially roadside attractions like Rock City Gardens and Goofy Golf—some less enlightened people call them “tourist traps”—and such wonderful phenomena as Googie); and feeding the birds and squirrels who live in my backyard.

Concluding Thoughts

If teaching and writing don't work out, I think I might go into physics. I'd really like to work on time travel. I just don't understand why more people aren't working on that.

And if that didn't work out, I think I'd like to be the next Dalai Lama. The one they've got now always looks so happy, and everybody seems to like him. That seems like a good way to be.

© 2006 Chris Burdett. All rights reserved.

Links

About or by me

Planet Burdett—one of my other sites

Various photographs from my youth

My color photography site

My black and white photography site (the “old” ChrisBurdett.com)

My CV/resume

The Caterer — one of my science fiction poems

Author sites

Robert Arthur (and the Three Investigators) (Robert Arthur's Three Investigators mysteries were the first and biggest influence on me.)

James P. Blaylock (He's been one of my favorite writers for almost twenty-five years now.)

Betsy Byars (The Eighteenth Emergency was an early influence on me; I continue to learn from this fine little novel.)

Bruce Coville (Jennifer Murdley's Toad is a great book! And so are all his others.)

Sharon Creech (Read Love That Dog and you'll love poetry.)

Gail Gauthier (I loved The Hero of Ticonderoga.)

Louis Sachar (All of his books are great; start with There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom.)

Jerry Spinelli (All of his books are great; start with Space Station Seventh Grade.)

Other links

Badge 714: The Dragnet Webb Site, because I could happily spend all my spare time listening to and watching “Dragnet” and other Jack Webb productions.

Cathy Young is one of my biggest Web influences, as well as a good friend and supporter.

My good friend Heather and her husband Tyler have lots of interesting stuff on their web site here.

In my novel In Hot Water, one of the characters calls Virgil's Root Beer “the Nectar of the Gods.” It is.

I got my undergraduate degree from the Department of English, Georgia State University.

I earned my first master's degree from the Kennesaw State University MAPW Program.

I got my second master's degree from the Georgia College & State University MFA Program.

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