Anniversary.
Saturday was my anniversary. No, not that one. Ten years ago Saturday, I sat down at my husband's beat-up old IBM notebook and signed up for what was then called Stories.com. People often ask me how long I've been a writer. I reply that it's like asking how long I've had brown eyes. That much is true: I was writing tragic Smurf fanfic at the age of seven, ludicrously overwrought poetry through my tweens, an awful science-fiction novella at seventeen and plays filled with angst through college. But I wasn't a writer. It was just something I did for fun. Writers were people who had clout, who knew something special, who had agents that got their books printed up and put in bookstores. I just cobbled about some words for fun. In college I printed up a half-dozen copies of that terrible novella and gave it to friends for their amusement, and that was as close as I expected to come for publication. To borrow a metaphor from Stephen King's On Writing, I thoug...