My Background and My Goals as a Writer

A little about me and what I hope to accomplish

My name’s Lawson Wallace, I’m a 63-year-old married man. I live in South Carolina with my wife Olivia. A woman I met on Facebook. I’m the oldest son of an Air Force Enlisted man. I write on Medium.com and I’m a senior editor for Illumination Integrated Publications.

My dad’s duties in the Air Force required a lot of travel. We lived all over the States, and we spent quite a bit of time in Japan. I graduated from high school at Yokota Air Force Base.

We lived all over the Country. We also spent time in Japan.

The traveling continued after my family moved back to the States. I’m hoping I will stay in South Carolina for a long time, but I will not lose sleep if I had to move someday.

I’m on Disability, so I have a lot of time to write when my wife allows it. My goals as a writer are, to make a living with my words. I make enough writing on Medium to buy a book for my Kindle every month.

I want to use Medium to pivot into new writing gigs.

I would like to pivot away from Medium and make money with other platforms. That’s why I have a Substack newsletter and a YouTube channel where I talk about my writing.

The ultimate goal is exposure, I want writing gigs, I know I can be an asset, and I need to find clients that I will be a good fit with. I’m confident I will do that.

In no particular order, here are my top twenty stories

I’m not afraid to document my mistakes. I have submitted my writing to magazines, only to get rejection letters. I ordered The Writer’s Market, I looked through it and found out why my writing was rejected. I wrote a story about it.

Sometimes, I voice strong opinions, this story is a commentary on current events. It received a lot of views and reads. It shows that commenting on controversial topics pays off.

I’m White, and I’m married to a Black woman. We have a good relationship. I write about our lives sometimes. Whenever I write about our marriage, the stories do quite well

This is a story I’m proud of, I was accepted as a writer for The Writing Cooperative. This was the first, and so far, the only story I have submitted to them. It was accepted right away. It’s one of my favorite stories.

I live in a delightful apartment complex. The neighbors feel the need to slam their doors as hard as they can. There are other issues with the neighbors, so I’m sure there will be other stories written.

I was homeless for almost three years. I write about the experience often. This is one of my most-read stories about that time in my life.

One of my earlier stories, and it’s the first story that had a lot of views and reads. I still think about that job over twenty years later.

My most well-received stories come out when I allow myself to be vulnerable. I wrote this story to get something off my chest that had been eating at me for a while. I felt much better after writing it.

When I was a kid, I and my family lived in Japan for a number of years. My dad was stationed there twice. During our first tour there, my parents moonlighted as English teachers. We became friends with a lot of Japanese people. We had opportunities to go to Japanese bathhouses on occasion.

Not only am I married to a black woman, but she’s also a lot shorter than I am. Even though we live in the American South, we haven’t had too many issues, although there have been some funny moments.

I’m a little rough around the edges, and I have a problem with overly-sensitive crybabies. I wrote this story to express my disdain for “The Woke.”

Another story that received a lot of comments. I don’t see the logic in dragging down rich people. Rich people create businesses that employ people like me. Dragging them down will not lift anyone up.

An early story that received a few reads. I started to write more personal stories. Those stories do well, but they are painful to write.

Another angry story. Census takers are still knocking on my door to this day. They ask the same questions and get the same answers. I have filled out and sent three completed census forms, but they can’t figure that out yet.

Let me start off by saying that I didn’t go outside until the cops and ambulance left the scene. I have enough sense not to go outside when there’s a gunfight in front of my apartment. A badly worded sentence in the story caused confusion.

When I was in my late teens-early twenties, I lived with my grandparents for a year, after I left Japan. The house was creepy, to say the least. I shared a true incident of a night that freaked me out.

Another early story was the first one where I wrote about how I met my wife. It’s short and to the point. I have written several stories about our relationship.

A story about bad memories coming back to cause pain. This is one of many stories I wrote about being homeless. As the years go by, the memories fade, so I don’t write about as much as I did, but memories and stories return at the oddest times.

Homeless shelters can be dangerous places. I tried hard to be invisible, but that didn’t stop close calls from happening. I almost was hurt a few times. I’m fortunate and blessed that I was able to get out of that life.

If you would like to read more of my stories you can have them delivered to your inbox as soon as they are published.