Firsts; what image does that bring up for you? Your first kiss, first car, first love, first paycheck, first child or if you’re a writer, first story, first book, first royalty check?
A life is so full of firsts. It’s hard to pick just one out of so many. I married at 18 and I’m still on that first marriage. In a culture of throw away things, I guess that’s pretty remarkable. Next month it will be thirty-eight years. Nothing throw away about that.
My first paycheck, not counting working as a babysitter for my mom and other families, was from the Johnstown Knitting Mill when I was sixteen. The place made shirts; tee shirts, reversible football jerseys, even men’s boxers. A good deal of that stuff was made from polyester, including the boxers. My summer job was to turn the reversible football jerseys right side out. They brought me to my station, a table in a corner between two big windows. A good spot actually, because the windows opened and I could get a cross breeze in the over-heated, huge sewing room. Dozens of women, my mom included, sat in front of sewing machines in long rows, sewing sleeves on shirts, hemming them and tossing the bundles of a dozen into bins which young men wheeled away to, somewhere. My job was to take the bundles of jerseys, turn each shirt right side out, re-bundle them and toss them into a bin. The entire length of the wall, the entire room’s length, 100 feet or more, was piled six feet high with these bundles. It took me all summer to turn all of those bundles. The first two weeks I was there I got up, went to work and when I got home went right to bed. I felt like I really earned that paycheck.
Writing is sometimes like that, a piecework job, sit down, do the work and hope you’ve produced enough words to get paid. So far, I haven’t produced enough to get paid but I’m still working on it. Unlike factory work, I like writing. I like getting into my head and turning random ideas into another world. So, one of these days, I’ll get my first royalty check. Won’t that be a good first!
The Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour is sponsored by the website Forward Motion (http://www.fmwriters.com) . The tour is you, the reader, travelling the world from author’s blog to author’s blog. There are all sorts of writers at all stages in their writing career, so there’s always something new and different to enjoy. If you want to get to know the nearly twenty other writers check out the rest of the tour at http://merrygoroundtour.blogspot.com! Up next: Jean Schara!