Good morning all! Please help me welcome author of Transcender, Vicky Savage as my guestblogger today!!!
WHY I WRITE
by Vicky Savage
When I left high school I had one goal in mind—get a job. College was not an option since I couldn’t afford it. But, I never liked school anyway, plus I wanted my own money. Because I possessed good secretarial skills (and because I lied about my age), I quickly got a job opening new accounts at a branch of our local bank. The work was okay if uninspiring, but it soon became clear that my two bosses, the Manager and Assistant Manager, were complete morons. After a very short time I could no longer avoid the burning question: Am I willing to spend the rest of my life making less money than and taking orders from Moron 1 and Moron 2? The answer was a resounding NO!
It was evident I needed to get that little piece of paper called a college degree, or spend my life kowtowing to imbeciles. So I quit my job at the bank, joined the laborers’ union and got a job as a flagman on a construction crew. Working outdoors, with no dress code and no one looking over my shoulder, was freeing. I made enough money during the summers to put myself through college. But then the inevitable happened, I received my BA in Sociology and realized I was still going to be relegated to another low-paying, lackluster job unless I took my education even further.
Three years later, I added a law degree to my bachelors’ degree and started down the path of the big-time lawyer. I landed a plum job clerking for a federal judge, who promptly informed me I was not allowed to wear pants in his courtroom. That was my first inkling that perhaps I was moving backward instead of forward. After that, I tried my hand briefly at criminal law, which lasted as long as it took me to figure out that my clients were, for the most part, well … criminals. So I moved on to practice business litigation with a large New York law firm and discovered that the clientele there was pretty much the same as at my old firm, only better dressed.
It took me some time, but I finally figured out it wasn’t the dress code, the clients or even the work that was the problem. It was me. In the eyes of the world, I was a giant success. But I wasn’t starring in the movie I wanted to be featured in. Eventually, I left the law to raise my two kids, which I’ve enjoyed tremendously. In the meantime, I began a writing career, and I’ve finally found what feels like my calling (okay, I’m a late bloomer). Writing is what gets me out of bed in the morning, makes me joyful (most of the time), and feels utterly right for me. People still ask why I do it when I could be making much more money as a high-powered attorney. I tell them it’s because I can’t not write!
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