copywriters

I find that most people who navigate to this page are interested in learning a little more about the man behind "Jerry Payne - Copywriter." (Either that or they’re just very bored and killing time). Well, what’s there to tell? I’m 47 years old, I live in Clearwater, Florida, I like to spend time on my sailboat, and I have a 19-year old son who pretty much means everything to me. He's away at college just now but the thing is, I remember when he was five as though it was yesterday. Of course it’s rewarding to watch your child grow into an adult so I’m not complaining. It’s just that I wish I could somehow go back in time and spend just one day with that 5-year old. I miss him. I love the 19-year old just as much - even more really since I have fourteen more years of history with him - but I miss that 5-year old and even though I know it’s the same kid...well, it’s really not the same kid. If you’re not a parent you probably have no idea what I’m rambling about. If you ARE a parent, you’re nodding your head in agreement, I’ll bet.

The cool thing about having children is, of course, that you can relive a lot of your own childhood. I don’t know, maybe from observing your child you begin to see life again through the eyes of a child. It’s a different way of looking at things, that’s for sure. Since the birth of my son I’ve had moments where something would remind me of a childhood memory and that memory would come in just as clear as if I had lived it this morning. The smell of freshly cut grass, for example, takes me back to summer days we would spend at my grandparent’s house on the banks of Lake Erie in a little town called Ripley, New York. Grandpa had retired and bought an 8-room motel right on the lake. It was on a considerably large parcel of ground along with a huge house that he and my grandmother lived in. The house was built in 1860 and had about a million places that a little kid could explore and hide away in. The motel was a heck of a lot of work for a guy who was supposed to be retired, and it seemed to me as if Grandpa was always on his tractor mowing the large, green yard that ran under the motel from the main highway all the way down to the lake. I don’t know if he was really happy running the place. I was a kid so it never occurred to me to ask.

You never think about things like that when you’re a kid. That’s part of what’s so great about being a kid. When you get older, it seems like you think about things like that all the time. In fact, I’ve been thinking lately that one of the problems of adulthood is that, as adults, we think WAY too much. That’s what I’ve been thinking anyway (and, yes, I’m aware of the irony). I don’t mean thinking about things that we SHOULD think about like, say, what we’re going to get our spouse for our anniversary, or how we’re going to finish the assignment our boss just gave us, or what we’re going to wear to dinner, or where we parked the car. I mean thinking about stuff that really doesn’t solve or accomplish anything. Like, what am I going to do if business suddenly starts to slow way down? Or, what would happen if I suddenly got diagnosed with an incurable disease? Or, how come my friend the attorney seems to be making more money than I’m making? Should I have gone to law school? Would people still like me if I was a lawyer? Do they like me now? What if nobody likes me? And what if I have to go out and meet people that don’t like me? And what if I don’t like them? And what if on the way to meeting someone I trip and fall? Or have a car accident? Or both? Or get diagnosed with an incurable disease unlike my attorney friend who would never get diagnosed with an incurable disease and who everybody likes and who has a really nice car that would never even dare get itself into an accident?

THAT kind of thinking.

Of course kids have their own set of monsters, I suppose. It’s just that I don’t remember them when I think back on endless summer days at Lake Erie with the smell of freshly-cut grass drifting along the warm lake breeze.

At any rate, that’s enough rambling for now. I really just wanted to put a few sentences together so you could get a feel for my writing style and I ended up with this. That’s what happens to those of us who write. We don’t just write because it’s our job. We write because we’re writers.