From a few clues and some long acquaintance on Facebook and AQC, I think I can assert with some probability that I may be at present the oldest member of this board. Today, April 18th, 2020 I'm in the fourth month of my 73d year.Though I caught the story tellers addiction quite young, life got in the way, and I never could devote the time to it that would wish to until after I retired at age 60. My literary heritage may be a bit different, and I think it may be worth the telling. My stepmother's stepdaughter from Mom's first marriage was a young woman a scant ten years older than I, but often took up the story telling duties for the young children. Even today I sometimes discover the cadence of Ione's voice in my stories as I write them. She also wrote short novels, first and final drafts, inked in cursive writing in Scripto notebooks. At least one of those I think might be quite salvageable, but her mind fell to the confusion of schizophrenia and a kind of religious mania. Some her sons defend her still awkward texts and their revisions as if scripture, and I doubt I will ever be allowed to edit or revise them. Ione had inherited her own fictive voice from her mother, a somewhat successful writer, a woman whose past is cloaked in mystery (because she lied about it,) and a still treasured if controversial figure for members of the LDS Church.

Ione's mother was L Taylor Hansen, one of the earliest of woman writers of Science Fiction who for some time pretended she was a man.

She is credited with writing the very first SF story that used Einstein's theory of time dilation. The narrator of the story meets a young man at a London cocktail party who turns out to have been a former slave of Socrates. The young man, kidnapped by aliens dragged about the galaxy at near the speed of light has aged but little, and miraculously, (here's the plot hole,) speaks 20th British English.

Eventually Ms. Hanson took to writing psuedo science articles on subjects like ESP and reincarnation. In the early 1960's she published of book of psuedo anthropolgy called "He Walked The Americas" which reports the repeated presence among Amerind tribes of a Christ like figure. Apparently this is what endeared her to the LDS church. She died wholly a dependent of the church. These somewhat dubious voices have always inspired me to write. My "novel" composed when I was about 9 was a Hardy Boys story I titled "The Secret of the Pyramids," which of course I also illustrated with a pyramid that I had copied from a dollar bill including the all seeing eye.

I was in the midst of a Master's Degree program in English and American literature when my draft board found me another purpose, the Vietnam war, which I left once and forever as the platoon Sergeant of E Recon, 1/7th Cavalry, 1stAirCavDiv. My military service repurposed my life. I retired from the Department of Veterans Affairs after a 30 year career in December of 2007.

I still continued to write, most of it business correspondence though often quite creative. I found myself writing lengthy adventures about VA disability claims which quite imaginatively tried to persuade Congress Persons and their constituent veterans that my Director was on their side. My personal stylistic innovation was to put words in my Director's mouth and use the I pronoun for him, completely obviating the classical bureaucrats passive voice.

I also managed to write with but little spare time from family obligations a 70,000 word fantasy novel of dubious value using cut and paste quite often when that was an activity one performed with scissors, paper, scotch tape, and real paste.

Writing my first self published novel, I was very fortunate to find the mentorship of a good script writer and Hollywood director, Rowdy Harrington. On long walks with our dogs we would discuss the current challenges of what we were writing and frequently exchanged books and ideas. At one point he was writing a script, an origin story, about a woman who first brought horses to The Lakota Sioux. Since he had never read Ruth Beebe Hill's "Hanta Yo" I leant him my copy which he said much improved his concepts of the tribe. So far I have written one Murder mystery much populated by veterans with PTSD. I am writing what I think is a historical novel set in Ft. Ord, California in 1970. My next project is I think a middle years children's book, a novel whose narrator is 8 years old going on 9 during the California flood of December 1955. I am very aware that I write for myself, but hope that one day I will also be writing for publishers.