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.