Did you ever think you’d like to be an author? Do ideas come to you and just linger in your head like a teenager at the mall? Do you ever write them down? Bounce them off your families and friends?

Have you picked up those scraps of paper now that the football season is over, and “Game of Thrones” went to Netflix? If so, perhaps you’re ready to take the first steps in a new journey, one that will take you wherever you can imagine.

I always wanted to be a published author. I day-dreamed about it through my school years and took a few half-hearted stabs at it when I reached adulthood, but life has a way of gobbling up our precious time. There’s a career, then a special someone, children, oil changes and all the other grains of sand that fill our hour glasses.

Not until I hit my 50s, and my mortality went from a postcard to a billboard, did I realize that it was time for me to get serious.

So, about eight years ago, I began to write my first book with a modicum of dedication. After a close call in 2014, though, I really buckled down. When the attending physician told me that I would have, well, run out of ink, if I had been 15 minutes later getting to the hospital, the first thought that ran through my mind was, “I need to finish the book,now!”

But even as the words were forming faster than my stubby fingers could type them, I realized that I really had no idea what to do with my manuscript when I finished it. Fortunately, I was reading a local newspaper (the very one you’re holding in your hands now) and I saw that a writer’s group, the Southeast Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association, had monthly meetings and was inviting writers, and wannabes like myself, to attend.

I’ll admit I was feeling nervous when I showed up for my first encounter with the group. After all, I hadn’t even finished a first draft and I had the gall to try to rub elbows with real writers!

I hesitated outside the doors to the hotel where we used to meet and decided to have a cigarette, almost talking myself into getting back in the car and heading home. Luckily, before I chickened out, another guy, standing outside, asked me for a light.

He was an older bearded man, wearing a flannel shirt and jean jacket topped with a very cool black hat. I figured him for a truck driver, laying over for the night, but when he saw me glancing inside, he knew what was on my mind.

“You here for the CAPA meeting?”

Surprised, I told him yes and asked him if he knew anything about it.

“A little,” he replied.

I stammered out something about how I was here for the first time and wasn’t even sure if I qualified to sit in.

He smiled warmly. “You’ll be more than welcome,” he assured me. “I’m the president, Tom Santacroce. C’mon in, I’ll introduce you to the gang.”

From that moment and to this day, I feel it was the best move I made toward a writing career. I was welcomed warmly by a great group of folks who all shared a love of writing. Never was I looked down on or cast with a pitying eye while standing up at the next eight meetings and explaining I was still working on my first book.

Quite the opposite! I was encouraged, informed and taught a lot about what it took to be a writer in this day and age. When the day came that I finally stood up and said I had finished, I was answered with a round of applause and kudos. It was that encouragement that helped me get to the next level: publishing and printing my book.

And that is what CAPA can do for you. We can offer a lot of advice, based on our experiences, but what’s really important: We’ll show you that you can be a writer, if you really want it.

CAPA meets at 6:30 p.m. the third Monday of every month at the Groton Regency on Route 1 in Groton. Our group is warm, nonjudgmental, and even the regular members will tell you how inspired they are every time we leave a meeting.

We have speakers to help us with myriad topics and learn much from each other on every aspect of the writing game. And it’s not just writers. CAPA encourages publishers, agents, illustrators, graphic artists — anyone who has anything to do with the written word. We also work as a group to promote each other and find new venues to get our work out in the universe.

So if you’re a novelist, poet, children’s author or just a person with a good idea and a pen and paper, please come to a meeting. It gave me the tools to get three books in print, and I know it can do the same for you.

Jim Bennett of Mystic is the president of CAPA and hosts a regular public-access television show on SEC-TV titled “Books and Beyond.”

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