Jeff Edwards's blog

Kids spend a lot of time talking about what they want to be when they grow up. Or, at least they used to. I suppose it’s possible that this particular topic of conversation has fallen out of vogue sometime in the past decade or two. So perhaps I should say that, when I was a fledgling human—back in the age before dinosaurs—this subject came up pretty often. I talked about it with other kids, and with grownups. For some reason, adults loved to ask the question… What do you want to be when you grow up?

In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill Sherlock Holmes.  I say tried, because his attempt at literary homicide (litericide?) was ultimately a failure.  By all rights, it should have succeeded.  As the writer, Doyle held the power to destroy that which he had created.  Holmes, by contrast, was only a make-believe character.  His very existence was subject to the whims and intentions of the man from whose imagination he had sprung.  Doyle should have been able to kill off his fictional detective with a simple stroke of the pen, but thing

My mother scared the hell out of me a couple of nights ago.  She called when I was in the middle of an evening run, and my heart nearly froze in my chest when her name appeared on my phone.  If you don’t know my family, that probably seems like an overreaction.  It isn’t.  Mom NEVER calls me unless it’s an absolute emergency, and (in her mind) nothing short of planetary cataclysm is dire enough to justify a phone call after 6:00PM.  So seeing her number pop up gave me a jolt of pure adrenaline.

I’m the writer guy.  If you’re not sure what that means, allow me to explain…