There’s something I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

No, not that. Get your minds out of the gutter.

I’m talking about writing. Mostly short stories and poetry. It all started when I fell in love with science fiction and Star Trek at a very young age. It made me want to write. Later, I discovered Kurt Vonnegut, and what I learned from him was how to have a voice. Naturally I copied his until it dawned on me that it wouldn’t be my own voice.

Along the way I discovered other writers, Stephen King, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, John Irving, Isaac Asimov, Robert Frost, David Gerrold, e.e. cummings, and many more, all of whose styles filtered into my subconscious as I sat to try and do what they did. I filled notebook after notebook with high school poetry, kept writing after I got out into the world, worked on short story plotting, began writing stories that weren’t science fiction but more about real life as I filleted, deconstructed and reconstructed things from the lives of my friends and myself.

But I have remained a novice, an amateur, a hobbyist. I haven’t been published. I haven’t really pursued it because my broadcasting career was my primary focus. I found I enjoyed writing for writing’s sake, and I could live with the fact that I was “untrained,” and that I wasn’t going to make a professional career out of it. In the age of the Internet, I could “publish” my stuff to a blog and whoever wanted to read it, enjoy! (http://darkaria.wordpress.com) And I started work on a novel which should be finished by, oh, the time we land a human being on Pluto.

But maybe, just maybe, opportunities are presenting themselves to do more with this hobby. No, it won’t take me away from broadcasting. I enjoy it too much and it’s my primary income — that’s my social security lockbox.

I can’t talk about it yet, because it may turn out to be nothing, or it may turn out to be something. I have no idea. But it fills me with a desire to start looking into this avenue. We’re all here to express ourselves, after all. And as my cat informs me, self expression is at least as important as loving someone, being loved, and making sure the cat is fed.

I’ll keep you posted.