About Stories, Random Thoughts

If I knew then…

Profile Picture for Philip A. McClimon Philip A. McClimon on

I #amwriting #amreading and have some #regret but there is only now and the #hope for #tomorrow

So, my mother cleaned out her garage and found some things. She asked me if I wanted them and I said sure. Among the items were lots of papers. Like, pretty much every report card from elementary school through college.

There were a lot of stories I wrote in various English courses through the years, including the first story I may have ever written very early in elementary school. It was the epic saga of Frank Furter writing to his good friend String Bean about his brush with death in the form of a stove.

There are some others through the years and it recalled to mind my love for writing almost from the first day I could write. It made me remember that the first thing I wanted to be was a writer. It made me think how I spent the next forty or so years doing everything except becoming a writer.

It also made me think that if I could go back, if I knew then what I know now, I would tell my younger self about all the mistakes and wrong turns I would make in my life and warn him so he (I) wouldn’t make them.

Sometimes, I think that I am the only person who feels that way, but I know I’m not. Captain Kirk feels it, too:

There are regrets I have, sources of pain. People I let slip out of my life, others who checked out too soon. Decisions I made that turned out to be wrong, ways I acted that make me cringe. The list goes on and the temptation to want to somehow change them all is strong.

But, I can’t, so I have to live with all the decisions I have ever made. Those decisions have made me who I am, for good and for bad. In the end, there only remains today and the possibility of a better tomorrow.

I have returned to my love of writing, maybe forty years late, but abandoning it for so long IS one mistake I do mean to correct. It is not disimilar to a comment from one of my English teachers way back when on a story I turned in…

May 29, 1986 (32 years ago to the day, minus 2 as of this writing)

I made a “C” but it could have been an “A” if it wasn’t turned in two days late. And that’s the story of my life.

Profile Picture for Philip A. McClimon

Philip A. McClimon is an author who likes to write about the end of the world (post apocalyptic, Sci/Fi), mostly because he thinks the shopping would be awesome (No crowds, everything free). He likes heroes that are the strong, silent type and not necessarily male. By silent he means up until the time there is something snarky to say, usually before, during, and after doing something cool. He writes Urban Fantasy under the name Billy Baltimore for no other reason than that he likes the name. Many of the same rules for his other stories apply to Billy’s, strong silent types, smart mouth, does cool stuff, but these stories take place in a made up town called Hemisphere and involve stuff you only ever hear about on late night conspiracy talk show podcasts, which are, if you think about it, pretty awesome too. So, that’s Phil. He’s not strong, rarely silent, and isn’t known for doing a lot of cool things. But his characters are.