My First Entry!

I have always thought/felt that I should be able to write interesting things:  I've always been very good with words, very good in English classes.  I have read almost everything that I could lay my hands upon.  Unfortunately, having a huge vocabulary and a talent for excelling in class don't exactly translate to the ability to write things that other people would want to read.  It took a long time to get beyond the "it was a dark and stormy night ..." opening, although I have used that and then proceeded to something totally unrelated, which at least got the blank page populated.  At about age ten, I stole a theme from my elder brother, and wrote a totally depressing poem, the which got published in a small anthology arranged through my school.  Over the years since, I bought books about writing (and related information) once in a while, and started collecting stuff I'd written in a binder.  One book had an article about the importance of a good editor - with a totally egregious grammactical mistake:  the editor wrote an article "berating" the lack of good editors.  Well, that book made a nice bonfire, anyway.  I never really showed any of these writings to anyone, although a snoopy boyfriend once got some information he didn't appreciate by, well, snooping.  Isn't English a marvellously silly creation?  Who would ever have thought of snoop, I mean that word for the concept thereof?  I had an English friend who claimed to never remember that 'priceless' and 'worthless' are not synonyms.  I think a turning point for me came in the Nineties.  Thanks to Ronald Reagan and institutionlised prejudice, thousands of gay men got infected through lack of decent, accurate information.  Yes, decent or accurate information was somewhat scarce initially, but what was known was not publicised.  And most of my friends died because of it.  At one point, there were only two people outside my immediate family who had known me for more than three years, and they were both women.  I started to write about the grief and the anger and frustration, and found a way to 'get the blank page populated' that didn't include setting out pen and paper and then cleaning the bathroom.  I've since regained my sense of humour, and find it much easier to write about the things that occur to me, or which happen in my life.  I don't know that I could invent a character and give him life, but I can relate my experiences and hope that the (theorectical) reader finds something to entertain and amuse within them.