How I Got Started in the Writing/Journalism Game

I'm not one of those who wanted to be a writer since he was 8. I didn't even think about writing until I was in the Army, in a clerk job, stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, and it came close to time to get out. I wanted to stay an extra year there, and I was an avid reader of the weekly GI scandal Rag, The Overseas Weekly. And that's where I got my start in journalism.

[I'm sure this is less than fascinating to all of you, but it's my life, and I think it's mesmerizing!]

I started by pitching the idea for a weekly grab-bag column of oddities--curious facts, interesting quotes from the news, and notes about when US bands were coming to town. The editor said, bring back 3 samples -- which, it turns out, was his stock answer to the many who came by pitching column ideas.

Apparently none of them ever came back: They quickly found that the first column was easy to write, the second column was hard, and the third impossible; so they would give it up. I, on the other hand, came back a week later with 12 finished columns. The editor was so surprised, he hired me.

After a couple of months I got a job there as a reporter too, covering courts martials. When the headquarters shifted to Oakland, CA, I moved there and got an editor gig.

But this was the 70s, and when the paper folded, journalism jobs were hard to find; I didn't have a degree, the Jschools after Watergate were spewing out graduates, and a major recession had just started in the mid-70s. I freelanced, and worked as a Kelly Girl, until the early 80s, writing ad copy, radio commercials, business proposals, and a feature story about dedicated word processors, which I managed to re-sell to the SF Examiner, the Arizona somethng, and a paper in Alaska that never paid me. Working as a Kelly Girl kept me alive, as freelance work was still scarce.

I ended up at Osborne Computers, first writing training scripts for the sales team, then working on the documentation team -- I wrote Wordstar and a Supercalc documentation for the Osborne 2 - the one that never sold, ya know. When Osborne collapsed, I ended up working for Adam on his Paperback Software project, documentation again. Our doc team them moved en masse to Dysan, which was publishing software on its new 3-inch (not 3.5 inch) floppy disk format in competition with Sony's 3.5-inch version. I continued to write freelance, including a history of spreadsheets for Personal Computer.

Then in a stroke of luck I got the News Editor job at a weekly computer trade journal called InfoWorld, and it's been downhill ever since! I spent 14 years at IDG, the mother company, as head of Reviews for InfoWorld (when its reviews were famous and influential), became founding Editor of IDG Books, where I dreamed up DOS for Dummies and hired Dan Gookin to write it -- and found out he had already had the same idea and had it rejected by all the other publishers already. Later I was editor of SunWorld, then when the Unix mags all folded, I founded WPI (Web Publishing Inc.) and made SunWorld into an online-only pub -- the first commercial online-only computer publication in the US.

I've fiddled around in journalism, especially online, ever since.