Patricia Stoltey

Author

The First Time

By:

Oh, don’t get your hopes up. I’m not writing about that first time.

I’m talking about the first time I was published. It was April 1990. The magazine was Popular Communications. An article I’d written on ham radio was incorporated into The Ham Column: Getting Started as a Radio Amateur.

The article, What’s a Neat Lady Like Me Doing in a Shack Like This? described my journey from complaining spouse of a ham radio operator whose radio shack looked as though it has been hit by a tornado to a General class operator who no longer cared much what the radio room looked like. I was too busy making contacts around the world as N4UNE.

Kind of makes you think of Twitter, doesn’t it?

Getting published that first time was a great feeling. I ignored the fact that my article was chopped up and apparently not copy-edited after the changes were made. I filed the tear sheets away because I couldn’t use them as an example of my excellent writing, not with errors such as “irratated” or “to” used instead of “too.” And I didn’t get paid for the article.

That was a one-time adventure in article writing, related to a specific niche from a unique point of view. It was fun, but fiction was my thing. Over the next few weeks, I’ll write more about my writing experiences and my unique journey to publication. I never do things the easy way.

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Comments

  1. Tune in tomorrow, gang. I decided to carry this story right on through to the bitter end. I hope my long, long road to publication doesn’t discourage anyone.

  2. Good topic, and I enjoyed your post. My first published piece was a feature in The Milwaukee Journal about the School of Jazz in Lenox, Mass., which I attended after my sophomore year in high school, and where I studied piano with John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. My being published was in part due to the fact that my father was Managing Editor, but he wouldn’t have let them print it if it wasn’t any good – he was a very exacting editor.

    Julie Lomoe
    Julie Lomoe’s Musings Mysterioso
    http://julielomoe.wordpress.com

  4. Sorry – I had been tweaking my blog and forgot there was code for one of the gadgets when I went to add my sig above. I hit enter before I realized, hence the delete…

    sorry 🙁

  8. This is fun! I’d love to hear about other writers’ first times… I don’t remember mine distinctly, but I do remember being published for the first time in my hometown newspaper. That counts more than anything!