By Mark Terence Chapman

(This is the first segment of a nine-part story, told across nine different blogs around the world, from the United States and Canada to Japan and Malaysia, in a sort of chain linking us all together. I’d like to start out by thanking authors Gabriella Hewitt, David Boultbee, Joyce Anthony, Suzanne Kamata, Karina Fabian, Ron Berry, KS Augustin, and Jamieson Wolf, in order, for hosting most of this story on their blogs.)

There really isn’t a short answer to the question of how I became a published novelist, so I hope you’ll bear with me through some history. (Feel free to get naked and bare with me, if you prefer. I won’t tell. This is a casual blog.) There was some skill involved, and some luck, but mostly it was a lot of time and hard work spent on writing and—most importantly—editing. If you came here looking for the “secret” to getting published, that’s it. You can stop reading now. On the other hand, if you’re curious about the winding road one novelist unknowingly followed, read on.

I hear all the time about authors who knew from an early age that they’d be writers when they grew up. They scribbled down stories and poems almost from the moment they could hold a crayon. They joined writers’ clubs and submitted stories for publication in children’s magazines.

Well, that wasn’t me. Although I enjoyed creative writing classes, and always did well in grammar, vocabulary, and spelling (even won a few local spelling bees), I looked at writing as a hobby—and not even an especially compelling hobby—rather than as a future profession. In fact, after high school I didn’t do any creative writing for more than two decades.

In my youth, once I got past the “When I grow up, I want to be a baseball player, a pirate, and an astronaut” phase, my career plan had me becoming an architect. That lasted until 10th grade, when I ran face-first into Algebra 2. So I switched gears and decided on a career in law. I pursued that goal through college, getting my BA degree in Criminal Justice in 2 ½ years and being accepted into a prestigious law school.

But life has a funny way of playing tricks on us. After two years of law school, I was home for the summer. As a lark, I took a computer aptitude test at the local IBM sales office, even though I’d never touched a computer before. (This was 1979, when personal computers were such things as Radio Shack TRS-80s and Apple IIs, and only geeks played with them.) I had no expectation of doing well, but I figured what the heck?

Imagine my surprise when IBM offered me a job, at 30% more money than I expected to make as a rookie lawyer perhaps two years down the road (after my third year and after passing the bar exam). So I took the job, figuring that if it didn’t pan out in a year I could always go back to school. That was 28 years ago, and I haven’t regretted that decision once. (Computers are a lot more fun than dusty law libraries.)

So how did I end up writing novels? Certainly not from working with computers, you’re thinking. Right? That’s where you’d be wrong.

To find out the connection between computers and writing novels, click here to read Part II, on author David Boultbee’s blog or http://davidboultbee.com/blog/?p=12. To jump to the ninth and final part of the story, on my blog, click here.