I want to be a bum when I grow up

Before writing stories I would write poems. My first poem was called worm.WormWax sack filled with rubbery slime, its kinda funny how they don't relate tome.I wrote this in 1st grade. I think I was born to enjoy more of the tragicthings in life. In 2nd grade I wrote my 1st short story and was hooked. Thestory was an amazing adventure in which a lion roams the city streets of NewYork. My teacher encouraged me to enter it into a writing contest but beforedoing so she asked me to meet with another teacher. This teacher was also a writer. Imet with this woman one on one and she began to fill my head with stories ofwriting and re-writing and writing again and throwing pages out to writemore. This is all fine to an adult but to a 2nd grader it was terrifying. I began to wonder if I wascracked up to be a writer at all, Scientist started sounding pretty good. Sitting down and rewriting my 4 pagemasterpiece 20 times was something I did not want to do. I wanted to writethough so I came up with a plan. My solution, write a new story that was only half a page.The story was horrible and came no where near the first story, but hey Icould write that baby over any day of the week. It was only half a page,piece of cake.I submitted it to my teacher and she liked it better then the first. Thiswould not be the only time that work I saw as inferior would rise to beaccepted better then work I really thought was important could be better then a lionroaming the streets of New York. The story was submitted and I won the youngauthors conference at our school. I say this not because it is a shiningtrophy of why I want to write but more as a joke. There is a famous quotethat goes something like this. Everyone learns how to write in 2nd grade andmost people move on to better things. Well I won the young authorsconference in 2nd grade and became sure this was my future. I want to be awriter. As a reward for winning I was shuttled on to a bus with other winners(I think they let anyone win) and sent to a college to talk with an author and watch mimes.My family embraced this dream I had by giving me encouragingcomments like "you will be a bum" or "that sounds like a nice hobby" . Itdidn't help that my grammar was and to this day still horrible.When I was 16 my grandmother came to visit. Mistaking all of my writing for garbage she threw them out. She threw out an entire file cabinet full of stories. She thought it was garbage. It didnÂ..ttraumatizede me. She was probably right, it was garbage. I can picture her reading the stories and thinking, Garbage! My grandson is writing garbage. Honestly she hated the idea of me writing. Editors share her sentiment. More on writing later.