How I Got Started

I never really wrote much while growing up.
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The only time I did any writing was when I needed to pass an English class in school. One memorable essay I wrote was when during high school freshman English, I was forced to read Shakespeare. Or to be more precise, "MacBeth". So I wrote an essay about MacBeth and set it to the lyrics of "Another One Bites The Dust".
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Got an A on it.
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After that, my writing completely evaporated as I had gotten stuck with a teacher who taught college composition, and wanted details before you wrote an composition. Suffice to say, that turned me off.
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For the next 25 years or so, I basically stuck to writing song parodies and amusing my family and friends with them.
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In the fall of 2005, I began suffering from a lethal combination of work related burnout; severe personal stress; and anxiety attacks. So in order to find a way to decompress without involving too many people in the process, I began to write. Not a lot at first, only a page or two. But soon, the words came pouring out and by spring 2006, I had 190+ page manuscript.
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2006 seemed to be a banner year for me, writing-wise, as everything that went wrong in my life, found its way to paper. When the year closed out, the only good thing about it (besides finding an agent, sort of), was that in addition to the novel, I had written about half dozen stories. Most of them were in the range of about 7,000 to 15,000 words, and they all ran with a common theme of broken relationships.
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2007 was a little bit tougher, as the ink well dried up to a small degree. I spend most of '07 patiently waiting for my book to be sold to a publisher (never was as it turned out), and battling personal demons in both the CyberWorld and the RealWorld.
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I did write one nice short story though. Late in the summer, I got inspired by the mountain next to where I live (title of this blog), and decided to write a short story called Cedar Mountain.
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It basically told the story of the four seasons (spring, summer, fall and winter) as it relates to the four stages of life (childhood, young adult, adult, senior). There were really two reasons why I wrote it: 1) I really got inspired by where I was living and 2) I really wanted to prove something, which was that I could write a story without resorting to either sex, violence or a combination thereof.
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So here I am in 2008. I'm still writing, although I'm concentrating on novels as opposed to short stories now. I find that my writing style is more suited to the long story/novel concept than the short stories concept. And if anything, with those half dozen short stories I wrote (got copyrighted but never published), I have instant outlines for more novels.
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Piece of cake this writing is...