The First Time

Oh, don't get your hopes up. I'm not writing about that first time.

I'm talking about the first time I was published. It was April 1990. The magazine was Popular Communications. An article I'd written on ham radio was incorporated into The Ham Column: Getting Started as a Radio Amateur.

The article, What's a Neat Lady Like Me Doing in a Shack Like This? described my journey from complaining spouse of a ham radio operator whose radio shack looked as though it has been hit by a tornado to a General class operator who no longer cared much what the radio room looked like. I was too busy making contacts around the world as N4UNE.

Kind of makes you think of Twitter, doesn't it?

Getting published that first time was a great feeling. I ignored the fact that my article was chopped up and apparently not copy-edited after the changes were made. I filed the tear sheets away because I couldn't use them as an example of my excellent writing, not with errors such as "irratated" or "to" used instead of "too." And I didn't get paid for the article.

That was a one-time adventure in article writing, related to a specific niche from a unique point of view. It was fun, but fiction was my thing. Over the next few weeks, I'll write more about my writing experiences and my unique journey to publication. I never do things the easy way.