the short
My name is Steve Prosonic. When I'm not writing I like to ride my motorcycle, take pictures, collect coffee mugs, and build computers. I was going to be a fighter pilot. I became a copywriter instead.

the long
I didn’t always know I wanted to be a copywriter. Once upon a time, I was on track to be a fighter pilot. It was all due to the opening scene in the movie, Top Gun. Get some Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone in your life and see if it doesn’t make your day awesome. I wanted to give some bad guy the finger while flying an F-14. I wanted to be Maverick.

I was on my way to the Naval Academy to become a fighter pilot.

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My reading career started on an unhealthy diet of R.L. Stine books. The fluorescent spines of my Goosebumps collection frequently tested the limits of my bookshelf’s structure. I spent every night with face and flashlight buried in the pages of a good scare. I explored mummy tombs, haunted houses, and evil swamps. I had plenty of nightmares as a result, but I couldn’t stop. I was addicted. You know a book is good when you forget to blink and your eyes dry up.

It was the highlight of my year to rush to the book fair and pick up the new Goosebumps book. My favorite thing was that each book had a unique tagline on the cover. For Say Cheese and Die it was, “One picture is worth a thousand screams.” As much as I enjoyed the stories, I gravitated to those one-liners. It was a pleasure to see how wit and humor would tell the whole story in one sentence.

Eventually I had to graduate from the world of Goosebumps. According to Scholastic, it was below my reading grade level, but I felt ashamed to be turning my back on R.L. Stine. I got rid of my old books to make way for new ones, but I’ll never forget where my love for literature started. My bookshelf is home to the memories of every story.

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Being a pilot is not as cool as the movies make it look. It’s still very cool, but the majority of it is class time and preparation. It’s plotting a flight plan, checking the weather, and doing preflight checks on the aircraft. It’s checking and double checking everything. Slinging through the air at 1,650 mph is dangerous, and if something goes wrong, it goes really wrong. So a lot of redundancy and preparation is needed to mitigate the risk.

Somewhere between the Bernoulli Effect and crosswinds, I learned that flying wasn’t for me. Since I was already doing my own reading and writing for fun, I took it up as a serious endeavor. I've since come to embrace the beckoning of wordplay, and I’m constantly growing in my quest to expand my rhetorical toolbox. So instead of a joystick and throttle in my hand, I've got a pen and ink to splay across every blank page I can get my mitts on.