peterdriskell.com

“Entertainment and Information Through Reading and Writing.”

I am a writer of fiction novels, adventure / mystery. I pursued sports, football, until I was a junior in High School. My love of the two books a week I read wanted more of my time. I left football for Creative Writing I and II, The Novel, Journalism I and II, Philosophy and other liberal arts pursuits. 

I did not pursue the passion of my youth upon graduating. I went into commercial construction and made very good money. The things it could buy provided for my family and satisfied me, until about fifteen years ago. 

I asked myself the question, at forty years, the same one I asked at nineteen. What will make me happy? Not content with the world whose condition I have little control over, but with myself. That led me to ask myself a question. If I were young, healthy and wealthy, what would I do with my life? 

I knew what would make me happy at nineteen but didn’t have the guts to stick it out. Thinking back, I was always telling stories with drawings, not good drawings for I had no talent there, not the kind that is in your genes and just happens to align with what your passion is. My big Christmas gift when I was fourteen was a Smith corona portable typewriter, but I did not use it as I got older. In my late twenties, I took New Testament Greek at Houston Bible Institute, a non-denominational language institute. 

In 1986, I got into computers and programmed a WWII military simulator on the Amiga computer for almost two years and twenty thousand lines of code. I taught my self and felt as though I still had part of a brain left. Amiga sales went by the wayside and so did my hopes of telling stories through computer gaming. I continued in construction, for the money. 

The ironic thing about the computer is that I had no intention of buying that C64 by Commodore when I went to Toys R Us. I was looking for an electronic chessboard and they were as expensive as my computer and the 5 1/4’ floppy Sargon II chess game I bought! My son Nathan, the creator and genius behind peterdriskell.com and my electronic submissions of eBooks, has played / worked on the computer since he was ten years old. He has a BA in Computer Science and a Masters in Psychology and hosts the website psychcomp.com. Check it out! 

I did answer that question, what would, what will I do with the rest of my life. I would write! Now at fifty-five, I have written several years, taken writers workshops and traveled the rest of the “want to be” circuit. The last fifteen years my classroom has been one occupied by the greatest teachers of the art of story telling ever assembled. 

I read twenty five to thirty books a year, most on cd as I travel the invested beltway to and from my construction work. I read pre-historic authors, Jean M. Auel “Clan of the Cave Bear, first time authors, Jeffery Daniels “Snow Falling on Cedars and Lionel Davidson “Kolymsky Heights”, cutting-edge authors, James Patterson, “The Thomas Berryman Number”, main stream authors, Clive Cussler, “The Chase” and Ken Follett “Pillars of the Earth”, and cult writers, Stephen King “Bag of Bones”. There are so many more authors that I can never thank them all, but I do. 

As Stephen King said so correctly in his book “On Writing”, a must have for any writer of any genre, “If you do not have time to read, you do not have time to write.” I would also add, “You will not know how to write.”  Even with a god-given talent, you have to become that apprentice and hone your skills before you can apply them correctly.  

The above is back-story, the following present day.