I want to write...

Hello, welcome to my blog about writing.

I've written for years and have the blogs to prove it. I've read a lot of books over the years and often thought I could write a better story than this... And for many, that's not anything new. We all have read something that makes us think that we could do better.

But the thing is, most of us never try. Wait, don't think I'm being smug or condescending. I haven't been published and before a few weeks ago, I had never written a story.

A few months ago, my wife had brain surgery. She's fine and Shands Hospital in Gainesville was awesome. The day we were admitted, we drove around Gainesville for a bit to find something to eat. A little past the Jason's Deli where we ate was a Books A Million, so we stopped. I was going to be in the Hospital with my wife for three days so I wanted to get something to read.

I've always been a fan of sci-fi, fantasy and horror novels. I have been on a Zombie kick lately, with The Walking Dead on TV and finding World War Z. I had bought a couple of Zombie books and they were ok. Decent but that little voice in the back of my head went off with the idea I could write something as good or better.

I couldn't make up my mind which book to get and asked one of the employees. He pointed out what he claimed was a really good book. It was that same book.

My wife walked up and said she brought her Nook and I could download books off it. I agreed and we left. That night I poked around on the Nook, which I had not done since she got it for Christmas. What do you know, there are a ton of free ebooks you can download.

I looked through them and found a free 600 page Zombie story. Done!

It was a book titled 'Zombie Fallout' by Mark Tufo . So, the next morning, waiting for my wife to come out of surgery, I plugged in the MP3 player (listening to it now, makes writing a lot easier for me) turned on the Nook and sat in the waiting room at Shands and read, listened and prayed my Wife would be ok.

My wife had a brain tumor, and the Neurosurgeon said she'd be out of the Hospital in three days. He was positive she'd be fine and it would be a quick three hour surgery.

I left the prep room when they wheeled her in around 9am. By 12:30 I was a little worried. By 1:30 I couldn't concentrate on either the music or the book, which was pretty darn good, especially since it was free.

I asked the person at the desk if there was any update and she called up. My wife had just been sent to recovery and it would be a couple of hours before she'd be in a room but everything was good and surgery went well.

I passed the news to the various family members that were there with me and went back to reading. I realized I was very relieved at the news but was pretty strung out from a bad case of nerves.

About four hours later, we were allowed up to see her and we rotated in and out, to keep too many people from being in the room.

She was up and walking the same day of the surgery and that just completely amazes me.

I finished Tufo's book Zombie Fallout about an hour before we left Shand's on Monday morning. Good book, good story and some interesting new ideas on the zombie field.

And after a bit of research, I found he had written several other books in the series. The first one was free and the next were pretty inexpensive in the electronic version.

And my brain started thinking. What if you used facebook/nook/epublishing to publish a book? What could you expect? Could you actually sell 1000 books?

It took a couple of months and a few more ideas but the end result is I got to writing. Nothing too much, yet but I decided I'd start a blog and post my thoughts and ideas and maybe even some of my stories and see what may happen.

Thanks for reading.