My Story

 

Some people love to talk about themselves.  I don’t usually like to do that, but since this is my blog and since people come to it to see what I have to say, I guess I do have to talk about myself.

The basics:  I was born on January 19, 1982 in a small town in Indiana called Terre Haute (the town where Larry Bird went to college, and I attended the same college a couple of times before transferring somewhere else).  I was raised just over the state line from Terre Haute in a much smaller town, one that makes Terre Haute look like a booming metropolis.  I grew up surrounded by corn and soybean fields in a town where cheerleaders date the star athletes (I was neither of those things).  It’s a place where the county fair is a big deal, where everybody knows everybody, and sadly, along with that, everybody knows everybody else’s business.  I come from a lower middle class family, the first generation on either side not to be raised on a farm.  Both of my parents hated it and moved to town and stayed there.

I was always known as the gifted kid in school, the one that never had to try but could exceed almost anyone else, a kid that teachers always claimed was too smart for public school, but no matter how many times they all said it, I rejected every offer from gifted schools.  I didn’t want to leave home, leave my parents, leave all I’d ever known.  I actually hated school, though I had such gifts.  I loved to read, however, and I think that’s what led me to begin writing.  I also loved basketball, and though I never stayed on the high school basketball team, I was very gifted at that.  I had no idea what I really wanted to do with my life, though, and didn’t think that either academics or basketball was going to get me anywhere.  I thought that, like many men in my family, I would join the military, but a horrifying car accident halfway through my senior year of high school ended that thought dead in its tracks.

 

I ended up going to college after all but soon dropped out, got married only a couple of years later to someone that I should have never married and didn’t want to marry to begin with, and I ended up sticking it out with her for eight years.  In that time, I never wrote more than just poetry, though there were hundreds of poems written.  My first and only attempt at writing a story before the age of twenty-nine resulted in someone finding it, showing it to her sister, and laughing about it, though I never told anyone about it or wanted anyone to see it.  I thought that I would never write again, but lo and behold, only eleven  years later (seems like a long time), I tried again.

Fast forward three more years, and I’ve now written three novels, a novella, five short stories, three books of poetry, and numerous joke books.  Enough about me.  How are all of you?  I hope that this gives you an idea of who I am.  I could have made it all much longer, but just this much feels somehow wrong.  I’d rather hear about or read about other people than talk about myself.  You can always ask anything you want to ask, however.  My answers may be sort of brief, but I’ll always interact with anyone who is nice to me. :)

-J. Wallace