$9.80

 One of my favorite pieces of authorial lore is the story of Ray Bradbury's classic novel FAHRENHEIT 451. 

Bradbury had an idea for a story, as many of us do, and had nowhere to write it. He had a newborn at home, so there were no quiet places in his house to work or a place for him to work quietly in the pre-computer 1950s depending on your point of view. He had no money for an office. Where was his friend with an IBM Selectric typewriter?

The story goes that while wandering the campus of UCLA, Bradbury heard sound of typing coming from the basement of one of the campus libraries. He found a small room filled with for-hire typewriters. For the price of a dime one could type away for thirty minutes. So off Bradbury went to return bottles or check the cracks of his couch in search of suddenly precious dimes, collecting an entire sack of them. Armed with his sack of dimes, Bradbury returned to the library basement and put his words to paper. Nine days later and ninety-eight dimes later, he completed a story called THE FIREMAN. (Finished, if my math is correct, in forty-nine hours or about five and a half hours a day!) Eventually, that story would be further fleshed out and turned into the classic we know today...a classic that got its first chance to be seen by the public thanks to a hungry young editor of a new magazine that was willing to take a chance on an unpublished novella. That editor? Hugh Hefner. 

I adore this story and the metaphor of the bag of dimes. We all have that bag of dimes inside of us, it's just whether or not we decide to use them or not on whatever you are passionate about. Maybe it's scrapbooking or smoking meat, it doesn't matter. It's potential and effort represented in dollars and cents. It's measurable and tangible. It's 98 dimes. It's 49 hours of work. And that means something to all of us.  

I'm off to go gets some dimes...who's with me?