During that time, I continued to write five pages daily and submit stories and articles. Gradually, I had fewer “dejections” and more acceptance letters. Because I love theater, I tried writing skits and one-act plays. When a few were published, I wrote more. I also kept writing both fiction and nonfiction for religious magazines such as Home Life, the Christian Herald, and Catholic Digest. One summer I went to the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference. On the first day, I intended to go to a panel on marketing but got lost on campus and ended up in the wrong building. I didn’t realize my mistake until the session started. I thought it would have been rude to get up and leave, so instead of the panel on marketing, I heard a panel on writing for magazines such as True Confessions, True Experience, and True Story. I had never read any of these magazines but since I was stuck in the wrong room, I listened to what the panel members said. I learned that these magazines publish stories written from the first-person viewpoint, as if the events of the story had happened to the narrator.
