It's been a while.
I've been easing back into the working world and found that writing was taking a back seat to the comfortable nature of being gainfully employed. This is my long march back. I noticed this past week that while at work I was beginning to feel a little less than satisfied. I couldn't help but ask why. I had only had the job for about a month and things were going pretty smoothly. The job itself was familiar and something I had been doing off and on for the better part of my life. The answer was simply that I wasn't writing and letting my creative juices flow. I had to realize that I opened a Pandora's box and there was no shutting it. Writing is an outlet for me for reasons I will describe later in this post. The important thing to note here is that I am recommitted despite not realizing that I had waned.
Why did I start writing?:
I suppose I have been for quite a while but not in a way that I wanted to make permanent. At age 14 I received a Toshiba laptop for school. Laptops in those days were around four grand and hideously expensive and bulky affairs by today's standards. The reasoning behind this benevolent gift was mainly due to my inability to read my own writing. This wasn't wholly the result of bad penmanship I might add.
It all happened at age 6. I woke up at around three in the morning. This memory is so strong that I still remember it in complete detail for about half an hour. No other memory survives in more than a split second chunk or so. I woke up and thought I saw a ghost in my room. There was a flashing blue ball traveling around the room at a snail's pace and I was tracking it as best I could but I couldn't quite see it dead on. At first I thought it was playing a weird trick on me. As a young lad I had been credited with a wild imagination that sported the fanciful and terrifying. I swore up and down that I had felt a snake coiled under my pillow. To this day I remember the scaley sensation and the immediate terror that followed. Even then I stayed perfectly still and took stock of my options. I slowly moved my arms out from underneath the pillow and ran screaming to my parents. The snake apparently wasn't there and this marked my first lucid dream experience.
But back to the ghost. After minutes had trickled by and I had tracked this ball of flickering light all over the room I decided to experiment with seeing if it would follow in another room. Indeed the ball actually managed to stay ahead of me and just to one side of my pointed gaze. I wandered into the living room and took stock of the time. This was more to gauge the relative anger I would receive if I were to wake up my parents. The wooden clock spelled out Jesus in the shape of a downward facing dove and gave the reassuring tick tock that grants children the reassurance that civilization is still at this very moment functioning. The ghost however had transposed itself on the clock. I composed a battery of tests which usually involved making unpredictable movements and sitting in areas of the living room which were only inviting to a child. At some point I went to bed. The next morning the ghost was still there and has become my constant companion ever since.
After some concerns from my first grade teacher and my inability to see the black board I was sent for a barrage of tests and it was finally decided that I had Star Gardts disease. A juvenile form of macular degeneration that is still non-correctable. I have no central vision. I basically look out of the corner of my eye at everything. This has influenced my life in countless ways. For example, at age eleven I came to the realization that the American dream no longer applied to me. The house in the suburbs and the white picket fence wasn't ever going to apply to the likes of me. I would never be able to drive. Having a child would be a risk. My visual impairment is passed on genetically and even with testing could be made elusive. To have a child would mean that there would probably be a 25% chance of them having the same problems as I had growing up and I don't think I can bear that weight of responsibility. If a child of mine did happen to win the devil's lottery and later came to hate me for it, he or she would be completely justified and just at the possibility of this happening makes me break out in a sweat.
Spending your life looking out of the corner of your eye has some interesting side effects. You do actually find most things suspicious as the metaphor implies. I find myself encouraged by Norman Rockwell real life settings of people gathering for company and basking in the mutual love and respect for it's own sake. The family with 2.2 kids and a two car garage is oddly settling. Everything else I see as an attempt to destroy the fabric of society and make things more difficult for me and therefore I despise it.
When I was handed my first laptop I used it as intended to take notes with my shiny new copy of DOS based Word Perfect v1.3. It didn't take me long to start banging out all the hate and rage I felt as being an outsider. Some people spend most of their lives cultivating a sense of otherness that allows them to stand out in a crowd. I have spent the majority of my life hating my lack of choice for that same feature.
On a particularly brutal day when my parents and I weren't getting along in an age my sister's refered to as "the dark years" I was banging on my computer. My father came into my room to tell me that everything I knew was wrong and that my mother was the penultimate sage and vessel of all wisdom and good sense and I would be a fool to disregard her words. Before his gruff commanding presence could be felt however he started reading what I was writing over my shoulder. In a stubborn denial of his presence I kept writing exactly the way I would if he weren't there. My father didn't comment on what I wrote he just read silently over my shoulder while I braced for impact. The words I was writing weren't particularly charitable or even fair minded. It did however ring true as the first time I could speak without being interrupted in that house in my entire life. He left the room before I had finished my diatribe of childish immature rage without saying a word. The next altercation with my parents was almost civilized. It was then that the power of the written word made its impression on me. It didn't stop the arguments. The worst ones were to come, but that nugget got buried away for a later date.
I had a creativity problem during those years. I thought my outlet would be music. I taught myself how to play the trombone for a few months and felt I was getting the hang of it. Then my over stimulated hormones decided to remind me that playing a trombone looked a lot like a training device for providing a high end blowjob. My interest faded quickly. Undeterred I turned my attention to the trumpet. This was an instrument that could get you in with the ladies. Fingering ability and firm muscular mouth control and the ability of belting out a jazz tune was my adolescent view of a good sexual training regimen. That's when my ghostly companion came in to rain on my parade. In order to play music I had to increase the size of the music sheets so I could read it. These bloated notes didn't fit well on a music stand and had a tendency to fall off especially when I had to run a page. Therefore I had to memorize the pieces I was playing and only use the sheet music as a rough guide for when I got lost. I saw no future here even after a couple years playing. My only solace being that I learned to play "Ode to Joy" and exerts from the "Star Wars" soundtrack.
From there the years got pretty bleak. I tried to develop some sort of identity as a nerd. I played nerdy games and submerged myself into technology. I thought to pursue a career in such fields and if I stuck to tech support I could probably hack it, no pun intended. However, I have an inquisitive mind and if I learn a thing I wanted to know how it all works and hardware was something that I was just incapable of doing. I have built my own computer before. An experienced computer builder can throw together a personal computer in about five minutes after prepping all the little pieces in a neat organized fashion. I on the other hand can spend a couple hours putting in just the CPU and possibly mangling the pins in the process because those little fittings and ports are just too much for me to overcome by touch alone. Coding software would be a nightmare. I tend to read by the common speed reading practices. This isn't for a faster reading experience but because I don't have the visual acuity to see each individual letter. That means software is out and my only recourse is troubleshooting. I'm pretty good at this but don't want to do it for a living considering pointing out a problem but not necessarily being able to fix it yourself without help is maddening.
So after many trials and tribulations I returned to writing. I can't imagine how many story ideas I have conceived and discarded over the years. I kept info dumping in the first chapter, got frustrated, and scrapped the whole thing. The only way I finished "Prey for Vengeance" was because I convinced myself that my friend Steve was counting on me to finish it. He had characters he wanted to write into a comic but couldn't come up with a suitable story idea. We started by spit balling ideas around and it became evident that I already had a story outlined in my head and in exasperation Steve more or less dared me to write the story myself and he would adapt it into a web comic. The first chapter or in this case prologue of the book contained the kind of info dump exposition that is the textbook standard of what not to do. So I took the prologue and spent about six months turning just it into a story giving the background of the story I wanted to tell. Luckily it worked. My first novel was literally a first chapter and I still had a large story I wanted to tell with even more characters. I accidentally found myself an author of a series. The epic struggle of longing to find a creative outlet for my frustration with my visual impairment and the artistic mind that my high school band teacher pulled my mother aside to point out had finally found a medium in which to swim through to the light. I doubt I could ever match the novels that I typically read and in some cases I don't really want to. I have found epic fantasy and science fiction and even thrillers have gotten a little crazy and too wide in scope. I'd like to tell the tales of people who might live in an over the top world but are just the background in most other author's tales. The man who'd like to start a family but doesn't have the means. In this current economic client I think it's relevant. Maybe it doesn't suit the escapist sensibilities of readers these days but it just might provoke something special like, I don't know, tolerance for your fellow man.
My job has sort of helped me gained prospective on this point. I work in retail in a produce department. It's not exactly glamorous, but there is no other profession that allows for voyeurism into the soul of the populous. You see the entire scope of human behavior. It's the one place that allows me to truly take stock of the world. I never understood just how thin civilizations thread dangled over anarchy until we ran out of cucumbers. The look of terror as a result of something rather meaningless is very telling and a gold mine for me as a writer.
I'm sure I could wax philosophical for days on the subject but I have some work to do on chapter 6 and 7 of Prey book 2. L.K. Campbell finished formatting my first novel "Prey for Vengeance" for Smashwords and it is now up on the site and pending the Meatgrinder. Her professionalism is unmatched and courtesy welcome. I asked for a projected date of completion and it was delivered on that date without delay. Her prices were more than fair and the money well spent. Her attention to detail was emasculate. She has earned my business whenever I can scrounge something up for her. If you are a writer banging your head up against the wall when submitting to Smashwords.com you can save yourself a lot of research and frustration. and I assure you the expense is laughably cheap compared to the alternative.
