The First Novel: Fulcrum Shift

The Hilarious Circumstances of How a First Novel Came To Be

I have been an avid fan and reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time and I always wanted to write my own novel but never got around to doing it. One day I just got fed up and started writing. This is how it happened:

I live in a mid-sized New England city that had its heyday a hundred years ago during the textile revolution. The city is populated by a multitude of three family houses. This packed the mill workers into close quarters so they could easy be within walking distance of the cotton and fabric mills. Anyway, I live on the first floor of one of these three family homes and my sister lives on the third floor. A while back she bought a brand new gas cooking stove for
three hundred bucks and right from the get-go the pilot light on it would occasionally go out. Well she would call me to come up and relight it. This is where my novel was born- right inside the broiler section of her gas stove. One of the times I went up there to light it I had my head deep inside the
broiler holding a lit match, trying to get it going when the thought occured to me: "This stove is a piece of junk. It's brand new, it cost three hundred bucks, and it's a piece of junk!" This train of thought continued. "What do you have to do to get anything of decent quality in this world."

My life until this point had been an endless string of broken toasters, remote controls,
throwaway VCR's and whatnot. It seemed to me that if you wanted something to last you had to pay good money for it and to pay good money for something you have to earn the money first. Now
I am just a working class dog and I am scraping by just like most everybody else. So what could I do? I could see myself thirty years later, still scraping, hoarding pennies in my 401K, and still tinkering with all the shoddy, mediocre quality gas stoves in my life. Well my novel was born right there. With my head deep inside the stove and the smell of natural gas strong in my lungs I decided to write the novel I had always been thinking about. After lighting the stove I drove directly to the local drug store and bought a spiral bound
notebook and a pen. I took these directly to my desk at home, sat down and wrote this line:

"The figure walked quietly down the cobblestone alley with purpose."

That was all I needed. From that point on the novel wrote itself. It just flowed out of me. I came home from work and sat down at my desk to write almost every evening. It took me about a year but I did it! Maybe it was the gas fumes!