This was not the kind of career I meant when I thought about being a writer.Īnd for another, no sane parent is going to support their child’s dream of making up stories for a living. I’d watched them struggling over their work, taking years to produce a single textbook that would end up being bought by no one except their own students. They were all very serious and depressed. For one thing, living in a college town, nearly every adult I knew was a published writer.
I knew better than to tell anyone, especially Coach, that I wanted to be a published writer when I grew up, though. No, I’d handwritten them, for fun, along with dozens of short stories and even novels, one of which I was particularly proud of, about the princess of a foreign land who needed the help of a handsome, lonely knight to save her throne. I had already written pages and pages of Star Wars fan fiction – not online, of course, because back then online didn’t exist. I’d been writing stories for as long as I could remember. Then there was my professor father who’d gone to college on a basketball scholarship, and was very proud that I’d finally expressed an interest in anything other than reading or writing. True, the only reason I stayed on the team was because my best friend was on it, and I liked hanging out with her on the bus. This is how I was often hit in the head with balls, and ended up sitting in the dugout.īut did this indicate a lack of hustle? This seemed harsh, even to my 10-year-old, probably concussed brain. Mostly I just stared at the treetops past the field, thinking of whatever story I was writing at the moment.
Worse, I was terrible at it, to the detriment of the team. But the rest of the game – where you had to stand out in the field hoping no balls would fly your way because then you might have to catch them – was less thrilling to me. Oh, I loved the part where you went up to bat to hit the ball. Me, no hustle? How could anyone think that? The conversation moved on to who, out of my fellow players, Coach was going to substitute for me, and I leaned back into the dugout, shocked by what I’d heard.
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