I was a teacher for twenty-seven years, but it took about twenty years before I admitted it. Until then I said that I was a writer with a day job. Eventually it became obvious that I was going to retire from my “day job”. I had become both a writer and a teacher.

During the thousands of gab sessions in the break room, one theme recurred regularly. Whenever the television or newspaper would report a teacher who turned out to be a sexual predator, one of my colleagues would say, “How could a teacher do that?”

I heard it on the TV news and I heard it from my non-teaching friends: “How could a teacher do that?”

If you have said that, let me suggest that you are asking the wrong question. If a person had the urges that would lead him to become a sexual predator of children, what jobs would he chose? Teacher? Boy scout leader? Youth minister? If you are a pedophile, practicing or potential, you would go where the opportunities are.

Most police officers are there to protect the public, but if you only want to drive fast and shoot people, what job would you choose? Cops or robbers – take your pick.

Even if 99% of soldiers are right thinking patriots, there will be some who joined so they can rape and kill, and get paid for it. Where else could they find a job with those benefits?

It seems to me that teachers and cops and soldiers don’t usually go bad. The bad ones start out bad, then blow their cover.

There is a flip side to all this. Kids lie. Kids make things up. Not every teacher (or cop or soldier) who is accused of a crime is guilty of that crime.

In education today there are strict, formal procedures for reporting misdeeds or suspicions. This is designed to assure that every suspicion is reported, but is then investigated by an agency set up for that purpose, not by the accused’s colleagues. It provides protection for the accuser and the accused alike.

I don’t see any better solution, and when I can’t see a simple cure in the real world, I write a novel.

In the late eighties, I wrote Symphony in a Minor Key, a novel in which a teacher whose life has been disrupted by false accusations has to begin again in a new school. There he discovers that when one of his students seems endangered, he believes her without question, just as others had believed the student who accused him falsely.

I will say more about Symphony in a later post.

I feel guilty of bait and switch. This post isn’t about the Beatles, or Sgt. Pepper, or the Summer of Love. It actually was forty years ago today that I first sat down to see if I could write a novel.

Would-be writers should take note. This was a controlled experiment. I wasn’t writing from the depth of my soul, nor writing the books that had been burning a hole in my brain for years. That came later. This was simply to answer a single question – could I sit down every day and write, or would my well run dry after the first week.

September 2, 1975 was the day after Labor Day that year, and I was at loose ends (see yesterday’s post). My wife and I were had just rented a tiny house in the poorest part of town; she had a new job as a picture framer. She proved to be very good at it, and ended up managing the gallery for most of the next decade. If my writing experiment hadn’t worked, I would have reapplied to graduate school.

Writing a science fiction novel or a fantasy novel would have called for a lot of time spent in world building. That wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know. A historical novel would have called for even more research, and a detective novel would have called for crafting a complex puzzle. I wasn’t worried about any of those skills. I just wanted to know – could I write word after word after word, day after day, week after week.

I needed a no-research story, so I decided to send my protagonist on a deer hunt, where he would get lost. I would set it in autumn, in a part of the Sierras I could drive to in a day if I needed to be on the scene. I would roll in a storm, with low hanging clouds so he couldn’t find north and couldn’t send up smoke. I intended to let him get out on his own. Over the weeks I piled misery after misery on the poor guy’s head.

GPS? Cell phone? Don’t be silly; this was 1975, when lost meant lost.

That was the setup. Here is the payoff – I wrote the novel. There is nothing exciting to say about sitting down every day and pounding the keys of a typewriter. (1975, remember; no computers.)

There were no exciting stories to tell my wife at the end of the day, but inside my head I was having a ball. Getting lost in the woods and finding my own way out was infinitely exciting, and every night I could go to my comfortable bed while my protagonist tried to sleep on the frozen ground. I was hooked. I never went back for my Ph.D..

I did go back a few years later for a second BA and MA in History, while I was writing, but that’s only because I love learning almost as much as I love novels. It had nothing to do with career plans.

The novel, Spirit Deer, was only 141 pages, far too short to publish. It turned out better than I had expected, and its core story was not age specific. A few years ago I got rid of Tim’s wife, his best friend, the forest ranger, the old hunter, and even Tim’s last name, and turned Spirit Deer into a young adult novel. It’s looking for a home. When it finds one, I’ll let you know here.

I had always planned to be a scientist and a college professor. By the time I finished high school, I knew I wanted to study ecology, but I was ten years too early. In 1966, DNA was the hot new topic, and all biology was done via an electron microscope. That wasn’t for me, so I switched to anthropology.

By 1970 the Viet Nam war was going strong, I had just completed my B.S. at Michigan State, and my draft number was 41. The Navy said they would make me an officer – so naturally I spent the next four years as an enlisted man working in the dental service of a naval hospital. If you have any connection with the military, that will make perfect sense.

At the end of my enlistment, I entered the University of Chicago. I had been admitted to a master’s program and intended to continue with my Ph.D., but didn’t work out that way.

During those four years of working on Marines’ wisdom teeth and broken jaws, I had lost my chops. Learning how to study, learning how to learn (not the same thing), and learning how to play the game (definitely not the same thing) are a college student’s chops. Like a musician, you have to practice to stay good. It took me half a year to get my chops back, and by then the next year’s quota for Ph.D. candidates had been filled. My would-be career was in hiatus.

However, all was not lost. When my major professor read my Master’s thesis, he told me to reapply the following year and they would find a place for me. In the social sciences, nothing is as important as the ability to write. Having a professor who believes in you doesn’t hurt either.

I had an unexpected year off. What to do?

I had been an insatiable reader all my life, and had always thought it might be fun to write a novel. I knew I could write, but doubted I could sit down day after day and write hundreds of pages. This was my chance to find out.

The day after Labor Day, September 2, 1975, I sat down in front of my typewriter. Within a month, I was addicted. I never reapplied to Chicago.

Tomorrow I will celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the day I sat down to become a writer.

Hi, I’m Syd Logsdon. I have been writing novels for four decades, but I’m a new blogger.

When I began, writers wrote, publishers published, and readers bought their books in bookstores – or at least at bookstands which might pop up anywhere. E-books, nooks and kindles, and the internet have changed all that. Now e-books outsell hardbacks and writers have to adapt.

Actually, this is an opportunity for me. Over the years I have accumulated a mass of knowledge, ideas, complaints, irritations, joys, disappointments, and backstage savvy that didn’t fit into any format available to me. Now I have a place to share these things.

What prompted me to start blogging at this time was the release of my e-book Cyan from EDGE, due in January of 2016. If you don’t know them, EDGE is the premier science fiction publisher of Canada.

Cyan is the story of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of a nearby habitable planet, set against the backdrop of cataclysmic overpopulation on Earth, and carried out by a fascinating and varied group of characters.

Old fashioned? No; just temporarily out of fashion.

Recent science fiction has often lost sight of the next century. This is too bad, since we are the last generation which can write what we want about nearby stars before astronomers map the actual planets which exist there.

You can expect daily posts here at A Writing Life. It is set up like a blog, but it isn’t a chronicle of daily activities. Each post is a mini-essay on some subject, current, historical, or timeless.  Most of the time, these posts will come four days a week.

At Serial, in the menu, you will find serialized fiction. Pop over there for details.

Drop in often; you will always find something new.