Some people like to cook. Some people like to eat. Many like to do both.

I am one of the many.

I don’t recall when I first tried my hand at food preparation, but I do know that I was cooking on a regular basis by the time I was twelve. Both of my parents worked, so when us kids (including my brother and sister) returned from school a snack was in order. If my parents wouldn’t be home for a while (this in an age when kids alone in the house didn’t prompt calls to social services), I might try my hand at preparing something for dinner. I learned by doing, along with a healthy dose of mentoring by my Polish mother.

Fast forward a few years and I’m in college, out of the dorm, and living in an apartment where my roommate’s idea of haute cuisine is a salami and cheese burrito. So I cook.

And I experiment. I don’t recall ever using recipes. I’m sure I did, especially for baking, but it doesn’t take too many years of cooking every day before you lose your fear of mucking it up.

After many decades of winging it in the kitchen, I’ve become something of an extemporaneous whiz. Open the refrigerator, see what’s there, and make a meal out of it. So what if the ingredient combinations are strange? Why not have pickles in an omelet, or a bacon, chicken, asparagus burrito with artichoke sauce? And don’t even get me started on the many sweet, savory, and spicy ways you can churn out fruit dishes.

My writing takes its cue from the kitchen. I’ll freely combine, mash, and even smash genres together, just for the fun and surprise at what comes out at the other end. Sometimes it’s complete garbage. But that’s to my eye. Another reader may love it. Which is a whole different question—should I write for myself, or for the reader? At the moment, I’m writing for myself, as the readers are few and far between. I hope to continue writing for myself even if, by a stroke of luck, I one day have readers lined up to get my latest book.

Then again, I’m a people pleaser. I could get trapped on a treadmill, writing the same kind of story repeatedly. A lot of big name writers are on that treadmill. Some don’t mind. Others desperately want to get off, but their fans won’t let them. Nor will their publishers. Nothing traps a writer faster than money.

But having too many fans is a worry for tomorrow. Until then, I’m going to open the word bag every day and see what kind of ingredients I have to work with. Then I’ll whip up a creation that, although odd, is nonetheless a taste treat.

Welcome to the blog that chronicles my thoughts and observations about writing, reading, and other critical facets of life (did I hear someone yell FOOD?).

I don’t have any great plan or purpose motivating these posts other than seeing how many consecutive days I can keep it up. Think Dean Wesley Smith, but without the writing chops or innate competitiveness.

To start, how about a little story from my past.

It’s 1978, fall if I remember, and I’m living in a dorm on the Michigan State University campus. I think it was Hubbard Hall, but don’t quote me. It had a gazillion floors, and I shared a room somewhere in the middle.

If you’ve ever lived in a dorm room, then you know they can be small. Maybe on the order of two hundred square feet if you’re lucky. To overcome that obvious limitation, my roommate and I built a loft. Nothing unusual there.

For the loft to be structurally sound, a beam had to traverse the width of the room. Whether it was our lack of engineering knowledge or foresight, the beam we installed lowered the height of the doorway entering the room. Not a big deal. Plenty of headroom to walk in without having to stoop.

One day I was coming back to my room from the cafeteria. I remember the food trough as being in the basement, but it may have been on the first floor. I was stuffed to the gills, much as a nineteen-year-old male should be when faced with an all-you-can-eat offering. But, sadly, not so stuffed to prevent me from getting into the grooves streaming down the hall from my room. If memory serves, the roomie was playing our favorite, Negative Neil Young. Probably Cinnamon Girl, although it could have been another of his offerings that featured extended guitar solos.

If you’re of a certain age, or of a certain inclination with music, the allure of strumming the air guitar is almost overwhelming. That was the era of windmill Peter Townsend, for heaven’s sake. And what goes better with a good air guitar solo that a flying leap?

You guessed it. I turned the corner to our room, took a flying leap while whipping up a beautiful windmill, and cracked my head on the beam. Split it wide open. No brain leakage, but plenty of blood—and at least a moment where I wasn’t sure who or where I was.

Roll forward an hour and I’m in the hospital, waiting to get sutured in the emergency room, when I hear a commotion out in the hall. Here comes my roommate, running down the hall with my bloody washcloth pressed to his head, nurses in hot pursuit. The whole time he is yelling “My friend is broke, fix him!”

I’m not going to accuse the doctor of sewing me up without an anesthetic, but he didn’t seem too concerned with my pain. A little sobbing was a small price for minimizing the time I was under his care, and at least he got some nice impressions of my molars in the bullet I was biting.

I’m tempted to claim the moral of the story is to temper your exuberance when it comes to air guitar solos. But my story is more of a warning to avoid your late teenage years. Maybe go into a coma around puberty and emerge in your mid-twenties. Living through the rise to adulthood can only do damage.

And, sometimes, that damage extends to a lifetime of crazy pursuits—such as becoming a writer. Maybe there was no brain leakage per se, but certainly I lost a good deal of common sense!