Publishing a Neighborhood Magazine

I'm often asked "When did you first become interested in writing?"

My earliest memory of writing is when my sister, Barbara Cagle, decided we would publish a neighborhood magazine. We were living on Pete's Path in Austin at the time, so I had to be about twelve years old. She had written and produced some neighborhood plays several years before this when we lived on Josephine Street in South Austin.

But, my involvement as a writer didn't occur until the magazine phase. By publish, keep in mind that the magazine was handwritten and each copy was handwritten as well. So there wasn't a wide distribution and the magazine only lasted for a summer. When school started we were too busy to continue the publishing endeavor. But I remember getting to write and I remember the encouragement from Barbara.

She told me I had to keep a journal of all the movies I went to see so we could include movie reviews in the magazine. I got a spiral notebook and on one side I pasted the ad for the movie clipped from the newspaper. On the other side was the movie review itself. I wish I still had that spiral notebook. It was lost in a heavy rain that flooded my basement bedroom years later while I was away in the Marine Corps. I lost all my precious books in that storm, but that's a story for another time.

I had the writing bug from then on. Aptitude tests showed an interest in creative writing, but my school counselors said I should think of it as a hobby since few people made a living from writing. So, I ended up majoring in computer science and wrote for the fun of it.

I took a correspondence class on writing short stories. One was published in Navy Magazine. Much of the writing I did was for work. When the boss learned I could put two sentences together and make sense, I was called on to do the reports, apply for grants, and all sorts of writing.

I wrote a computer book with my lawyer boss, James Dunlap, called Automated Law Office Systems. It was published by West Publishing.

I think writers have a need to write. My sister is still writing. She had a funny article published in the Sunday magazine of a Houston paper and she has placed in several writing contests as well.