Roger Hardnock

My first career was designing cool things, like cars. I actually went to school to be a car designer. I did that for a long time, and actually never even considered being a writer. I'd done a bit of technical/business writing, and even managed an advertising department for a while, but still, never thought of writing a book. One day I got it in my head to try writing something creative. I had several basic story ideas, and took my favorite one, about an old man on his porch listening to his baseball game on the radio. I had that, and the ending, but nothing in between. I figured I could somehow scratch enough words together to make a short story. The amazing thing was, that once I started writing (long hand), the story opened up and started expanding. I wrote and wrote until eventually I had more words than I knew what to do with, about 132,000. From there I spent two plus years editing it down to where it is now.