2024 Personal Essay Writing Challenge: Day 7

We’ve made it to the final day of this challenge. Well, kind of the final day. I’ll share a post tomorrow with next steps, but for now, let’s write our final essays of the week (and month).

For today’s prompt, write a writing and publishing journey essay. For this essay, you could write about a particular high point in your writing and publishing journey, or perhaps a low point. Or maybe write about the moment you got started in writing, or when you returned to writing after a long break. Or maybe when you got published, rejected, praised, or criticized. By now, you’ve probably got the glimmer of an idea.

Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.

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Completely separate of this fun and free personal essay challenge, be sure to check out the annual Writer’s Digest Personal Essay Awards. The top prize is $2,500 cash, publication in Writer’s Digest, and more.

Click here to learn more.

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Here’s my attempt at a Writing and Publishing Journey personal essay:

“A Faulty Mind Bomb,” by Robert Lee Brewer

My publishing journey began when I was a teenager, and I went with some friends to see a local band named Brainiac at a club/record shop called Network in Dayton, Ohio. It was the first time that I met and talked with Brainiac’s frontman Timmy Taylor as the third wheel in a conversation between him and one of my friends who both talked about his guitars. And that was beyond cool, to talk with a musician about their process. But something even more momentous happened that night: I discovered fanzines.

Away from the stage and the crowd, in the record store part of the place, I started thumbing through these music magazines of different shapes and sizes, some of them just copy paper folded in half and stapled together at the spine. I fell in love almost immediately and started thinking, “I could do this.”

Not long afterward, the first issue of Faulty Mindbomb was born, mass produced using the copy machine in the high school library and sold for two quarters. That first issue included poems, music information, and a great cover drawn by my friend who talked with Taylor earlier. The second issue, still only 50 cents, more than doubled in size and included more poems, some fiction, a band interview, music reviews, and even a comic.

With the third issue, I started working with a local printer (think I was kicked off the library copy machine) to create a classic fold-over chapbook style fanzine. By now, each issue had a mix of poetry, fiction, comics, music reviews, and local band interviews. And they were getting distributed in ways I had not expected, so that local (and not so local) bands and zinesters were reaching out to me by mail and phone. 

I found myself receiving free demos and packages weekly, and then, I received a call from a band that wanted to pick me up and take me out to hang out with them and watch them play. Mind you, they had to pick me up to take me out, because I didn’t have my driver’s license yet. And they did, and it was crazy, and it was great, but not the highlight.

I thought the highlight was when I decided to try selling copies of Faulty Mindbomb at one of the local record stores, Trader Vic’s Music Emporium. I got my first lesson in how consignment sales work, and the person who helped me fill out the paperwork was none other than Timmy Taylor, frontman of Brainiac, which I mentioned in that issue of the fanzine. Highlight city, right?

Soon after, I was traveling with my friends to a Brainiac show that also featured another friend’s band. And it was an amazing show with Timmy wandering through the audience, drummer Tyler Trent splintering drum sticks left and right, and everyone (no, EVERYONE) in the place dancing and moving. Afterward, covered in sweat, I wandered up to the stage to grab half of a broken drum stick as a memento and saw it, propped up against Trent’s bass drum throughout the whole set was the latest copy of Faulty Mindbomb. New highlight and best moment in publishing.

Of course, as a kid, I still had no intentions of being an English major or becoming an editor. I didn’t have such grand ambitions. I was just a young guy having fun doing something I loved, and now that I step back and look at what I’ve done since, I suppose that’s been my main goal all along. Even today, I’m just a writer having fun writing and encouraging others to do the same. And wherever that takes me or my writing is anyone’s guess.