The Beginnings of Infused

At one point when I was in college, I saw the "The Man in the Bottle" episode of the old Twilight Zone TV series in which a man finds a genie in a bottle, but soon finds that his wishes lack enough detail in them to prevent them from being ruined - for instance, he asks for a million dollars, but after giving away a little of it, the IRS ends up taking the bulk of it.

Being a studious student, I felt that it would be a good use of my time to come up with the exact wording for the best three wishes I could think of (just in case someone decided to grant them to me). After spending a good bit of time coming up with what I wanted the three wishes to be (I am a very thorough and logical thinker), I then spent even more time working out the wording to make sure that I didn't get shafted.

Years later I decided that I would try to write a story with those three wishes being given to a college student. There was only one problem, I had gotten a degree in Computer Engineering, and was horrible at writing. I ended up writing about one page worth and found that even I didn't want to read it, it was just a bunch of disjointed sentences; this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. So I gave up.

Five years or so passed and then I saw the movie Bedazzled. That story is about another man who did not give enough requirements for his wishes and they were all ruined. This reminded me about my list of wishes and I once again decided to attempt to write my story. However, I found that my writing was still very bad, and gave up after writing two pages or so.

Another five years passed and I tried it again with no better luck. But it was harder to just forget about it though as I have a hard time getting to sleep quite often and many times I would end up thinking about how my story would begin. But, unfortunately, I was visualizing it more as a movie than thinking of the words needed to be able to describe what was going on, so I gained no useful insights.

Finally, after another five years or so, I sat down to try and write the story and wrote the first chapter - and here's the thing; it didn't suck! Apparently all those years of reading in bed had sunk in and I had developed the ability to write.