The Who of Me

Prison is a lot like high school: The uniforms are horrid, cliques are common, money buys importance, the cafeteria food is a step above generic dog food, and if you're lucky you don't get sodomized often.

I think this also speaks to writing, well the last part anyway. I've decided to keep this blog as a kind of kick in my behind; a way to help me work out ideas, share my frustrations, and possibly help other struggling writers. By help I mean: convince you to give it up before it consumes your brain like syphilis.

What qualifies me to write a blog, and why should anyone care? I'm a big fan of reading, studied literature in college, and have been writing since I could write. I have my first attempts and they're funny to read. I got serious in high school though, writing terrible teen angst bullshit and pretentious poetry I kept in a Marvin the Martian sketch book. Marvin housed all my best similes. College was when I was most prolific, but it was also when I was coming out, so all my stories involve a shy, nerdy, but terribly handsome without the glasses, boy who crushes on the straight popular boy from afar. Sometimes they ended happily, sometimes not, but they were always just about pure wish fulfillment and ultimately not worthy of showing anyone.

I did some fantasy work during that time too, but it was all very shallow and not well thought out. Like every writer, I have thousands of pages with half written stories, and ideas I didn't want to forget. For a period of time, I wrote little. I kept journals and such, but my time was limited by working. However, some of the things I was writing were really interesting. It went like that for a while, until I tried to give it up.

Being a writer is like being a junkie, except you can't give it up. Even bad writers are compelled to write whether they like it or not (and I'm not certain which category I fit in yet).

Now I'm nearing thirty and, to be vulgar, it's time to shit or get off the pot. I'll never be able to stop writing, but I've decided that it's time for me to take it seriously. I've decided that I want a rough draft of a book finished by Christmas. I had about 150 pages of something finished, but I realized it was all wrong and put it aside to perform the autopsy later; maybe I can revive it better than it was. However, I have another story. It's fleshed out for the most part, and it's what I want to write.

This is my record of my process. I'll write about the challenges I'm facing, how I overcome them, and what I do when I can't write or am doing everything in my power to avoid it.

As for what I write, I'm a little all over the place. I fall into young adult literature, sci-fi/fantasy, and surreal. My ideas don't really fall into categories, so I may jump from what I'm working on now (adult fairy-tale/fantasy/horror), to a fictional biography of a couple who suffered from folie a'deux: shared madness.

So if anyone's interested, I'll do my best to write this thing daily and make this worth someone's effort to read.

Song of the Day: Jenny Owen Youngs "Hot in Herre"