That's easy, and not so easy. As a kid, I loved to read. I still read compulsively. I cannot imagine anyone writing fiction without loving to read themselves.

At some point when I was nine years old, I realized I wanted to create the same enjoyable feelings in others that I experienced from reading good stories.

Why this shift happened for me, I don't know.

But I started writing a "novel," though I'm sure I couldn't have written more than a few thousand words, at most. It imitated Edgar Rice Burroughs, my favorite author at that time.

I may have continued to write, except I made the beginner and childhood mistake of showing it to somebody. I named the heroine for the mother of my best friend, who lived next door, and she and everybody else but got me got a big laugh out of it. I realize now they didn't mean anything malicious, but I could no longer continue writing that story.

When I began writing again at the age of 16, I never showed my manuscripts to anybody except editors.

I never lost that desire to be a writer. And at age 16 I decided it was time to start. I began reading The Writer and Writer's Digest magazines. My family bought me a high-quality Adler manual typewriter. I checked how to write books out of the library. I learned the professional manuscript format. I knew what science fiction and fantasy magazines were being published just from seeing them on sale and buying them. The writing magazines must have carried some kind of market reports as well, because I know my first submission was to Harry Harrison for a one-time anthology.

Soon, standing in line at the Post Office to mail off 10 X 13 manila envelopes, and receiving 9 X 12 manila envelopes in the mail, became a daily routine.

I like to keep them filed away with my paper copy of the story, but I received my share.

Only when I stopped submitting manuscripts to traditional publishers, and if I continued writing short stories, as I'd like to do, I'd still be receiving a bunch of rejection slips.

It never really stops. I recall a Lawrence Block column in Writer's Digest discussing how, even though he was a bestselling, award-winning author, he got rejections all the time. From foreign publishers. From movie producers. Even from the mystery magazines, despite his big name.

I'm rejected every time a potential reader lands on the sales page of one of my books -- whether on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, and so on -- and fails to buy. I don't get a piece of paper thanking me for my submission but it doesn't meet their needs at the moment, yet it's a rejection.

I soon learned of fanzines and semiprozines. For some reason, the field of science fiction (and related fields of fantasy and horror) have always attracted a large number of self-publishers. Maybe people who read outside the mainstream tend to be more do-it-yourself types.

Fanzines are small magazines published anybody willing to put in the work. The most popular format at the time was mimeograph, so it helped to have a mimeograph machine or, at least, access to one.

Most were put out for the sheer love of the field and expressing yourself. Many focused on fans and fandom. But many published short stories.

Many of those didn't pay the author, just sent them a courtesy copy.

A few paid the author a small amount of money. Nothing to get excited about. $5 to $10. Just enough so the author could say they made some money from work, but not enough to make a living from selling stories to such markets. They were called semi-prozines.

The prozines (professional magazines) paid the going professional rates.

Anyway, publishing stories in fanzines and semiprozines didn't get you much respect, but I submitted to them, and published some stories.

It's worth noting here:

1. In the field of literary fiction, most magazines published by universities do NOT pay for the stories they publish. Even the very best. Except they call sending the author copies "payment." The prestige of being published there outweighs any financial return they could afford to send you.

However, the prestige is real. Many literary authors have leveraged stories published in university literary magazines to get contracts for novels from publishing companies and/or positions teaching English at universities.

2. Writing SF/F/Horror short stories has not been a viable career since the pulp magazines went out of business in the mid-1950s. At the time I began writing, the best-paying prozines paid about 4 or 5 cents per word. Certainly a lot more than I received from the semiprozines, but NOT enough for anybody to live on, even before the inflation of the last forty years.

Writers who wished to write full-time wrote short stories only for the love of them, and to build or maintain their reputations, while they received most of their money from novel advances and royalties.

Even back then, it was tough, and not many writers could do it for long. Even many of the masters.

Whew boy!

I wrote a long blog post about this recently. Let me just say, the two biggest things that encouraged me to read and keep reading were libraries and news stands.

NOT bookstores.

I grew up in the small city of Alton, Illinois. Part of the St. Louis Metro area. We did NOT have a bookstore. (And still doesn't. Although for a few years Alton Mall had both a B. Dalton and Walden Books, that was decades ago.) Beginning at the age of 9, I bought comic books, Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks, science fiction magazines, and everything else from a local drugstore and two news stands I frequented.

I bought every Ace Science Fiction Special at a news stand.

I bought every Ballantine Adult Fantasy at a news stand.

I bought the Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories -- containing the first published stories by one Stephen King -- at a news stand.

In high school, I also began buying books by mail, from a dealer. That would be the equivalent of ordering over the Internet these days.

To the best of my recollection, I never walked into an actual bookstore until my early 20s.

I love them, but don't feel indebted to physical brick and mortar bookstores. They weren't there for me when I was growing up in Alton. To me, Amazon and Smashwords are just as deserving of my support as my local Barnes & Noble. I do like seeing and handling the physical books before buying them, but I also like reading reader reviews, so there's a trade-off.

You mean, like have a life?

Just because Alton Illinois is, according to FATE magazine, "the most haunted small town in America?"

Basically, I had a fairly normal childhood. I did run around a lot. I belonged to a summer swim club, and swam on the swim team. So I guess I was more athletic than typical writers. I never got good enough to talk about, though.

I did typical teenage stuff such as fall in love and have a broken heart, think I knew better than I did, rebel, and so on. Since it was the late 60s, that took the form of being a hippie radical.

I went to college first as an English major. After he read my very first paper, my teacher told me I was going to be a "problem student."

I dropped out, worked as a lifeguard for the minimum wage, got tired of that when none of my novels sold, returned to school and graduated with an Accounting degree.

Then went to work for the Social Security Administration.

Got married, got divorced. Worked a bunch of part-time jobs.

Now I'm living out my dream of writing fiction full-time.

A secret website run by the ghost of Alexander Dumas. Sorry, but I'm not allowed to give out the link.