Blog

Good LATE evening. (It is evening for me again.)

Yes, I can sleep.

No, I’m not an insomniac.

I sleep very well actually.

And no, it’s not tomorrow until I sleep.

I stayed up for 34 hours one time and lost my freaking mind. Seriously. I was shopping for a green button-up for St. Patrick’s Day with my two cousins, (I was meeting my girlfriend’s, now beautiful wife’s, family for the first time, and I had to look good) and I swear to you, the mannequins were freaking moving.

I hate that word… freaking.

Anyway, good evening again.

This one is a tough one. The powers that be (The All-Tyrannical Haley) asked me about my favorite authors. I looked at Tiarra and chuffed. She told me to write.

HOW DO YOU MENTION ALL OF THAT IN ONE POST?

So, as Dr. Wilton would say, I’ll “sprinkle” it in my posts-to-come and some here.

But to start, the guy that made me want to write in a sort of, off-beat, style fantasy was Glen Cook. That guy…

If you haven’t been along with Croaker or any of his buddies in The Black Company series, do it. Cook wrote a realism that blurred the lines between good and evil while all the while, making a world of fantastic beings that can still make me shit my pants, and give me nightmares.

Second, I can’t mention authors without the one that carried the most weight.

When I was in middle school, my dad had me read, The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.

It messed with my world.

And then later, I picked up The Illustrated Man.

That put it back together in a beautiful tapestry of heart and soul.

Without writing you a literary analysis of why Ray Bradbury is THE best author of all time, I’ll mention just one thing: emotion.

I love Bradbury’s work because no matter the setting, grassy fields of Mars, or a midnight drifter camp with freakshow-traveler, all of his characters feel.

And feel everything.

And share that feeling in such a beautiful way, you are scared for them, concerned, sad, and you are broken when they are broken. I wanted that for my characters. I love the emotion that people, time and space away, can give you to experience what they do.

To me, it’s like these people are giving you a piece of their heart, trying to make you understand what they are struggling with, just like everyone you grow close with in life.

That’s enough of that…

So, I like Ray Bradbury and Glen Cook a lot. They are good.

*reads aloud to himself

“Mission as a writer??? What the hell?”

To be fair, Haley is a fantastic blogger.

This is my… sixth time blogging. Because this is the sixth post.

And again, I will apologize to Tiarra because what you see, she has seen fit to make it what you can actually see.

Mission as a writer…

If I could sell enough books to maybe snag myself like, three, NO, four bottles of Blanton’s, I would write for the fun of it. 😉 After four bottles of Blanton’s anything could be fun. Or you’d be dead. One of the two.

As serious as I can be… which is little in its own right, I can encompass this in a comment made to me by one of my poetry professors, Ken Raines. He said something to the effect of, if you write and don’t want to be read, keep a journal. If you don’t want that to be read when you die, don’t write at all.

That could very well be a quote from someone famous and I just butchered it, and totally didn’t cite the original quote. No MLA or APA here, mate!

Or it was his, and I just stole his credit. Sorry.

But it did get me thinking, and in my late-night writing I realized that one evening: I write with the mission to be read. I like sharing my stories. I like making people think about things that could be. It’s fun to get people to say, “That’s cool.”

Because “cool” is one of the words that has survived a great deal of colloquial change.

Hell, we simplify definitions of modern colloquialism by that one word.

So, yes.

My mission in writing is to be read, and have a person close their tablet, book, phone, etc. and say, “That was cool.”

Now, Blanton’s.

Okay, so sticking with some more “sprinkled” details, as one of my mentors would say, I was encouraged to fit my blabbing’s around some central theme. Like skin on a skeleton. No matter what you do, it will fall off with time. 🙂

To answer the question Haley posed to me, what did I read when I knew I wanted to write.

This has two answers.

When I was sixteen, my class read Homer’s Odyssey and I was consumed with such a tale of adventure. We were then asked to write our own odyssey, of sorts. Sixteen pages, or a page a year about our lives. I was in AP English so don’t worry. The assumption was we could, or should, be able to complete this.

I can never tell this story with a straight face.

My teacher, Mrs. Pamela Hughes, stared at me like I had just kicked her in the shin. “I don’t think you understood the assignment.”

I was already not in agreement. I wasn’t totally dumbstruck from being on the line in football, but she shook her head.

“Everyone wrote about their earliest memories, starting school, sports, family vacations, and those sorts of things.”

She glared, sliding me my stack of sixteen pages.

“You expect me to believe this?”

I shook my head. “I thought I’d spice it up. Make it fun.”

And that made her laugh. Or smile. A smile is after all just a laugh trying to keep hidden.

In my odyssey, I was an assassin, orphaned, who was recruited to a school where I was trained to fight from the age of five. There were parallels to my real life! But there were also grenades, and swords and villains a plenty!

She still gave me an “A.”

Or a high “B.”

The second was when I took my first writing course in college. In all honesty, I didn’t know what I wanted to do my first year as a fulltime college student. My writing professor, Dr. Marilyn Wilton, assigned our first writing assignment and I wrote an X-Men rip-off about me and my sisters as mutants with powers in Boston.

It was terrible.

But Dr. Wilton’s ability to see through the atrocious dialogue tags and grammar from hell offered me something I had never received before: she found what she liked and didn’t like and told me to go and fix it.

Both felt so good, notes and praise.

And the flint was lit, spoon held aloft, and I felt the first real satisfaction of sharing my (terrible) fiction with others.

So, I didn’t answer the second part and just got lost in talking, which happens.

Good evening.

It’s evening for me.

Please, don’t be that person who’s like, “Its 12:01a.m. It’s tomorrow.”

Nobody laughs at that joke.

So, good evening.

I was instructed to follow some topics for blogging. Structure. It’s good for us… some say. And yes, when Haley and Tiarra get their moment to guest blog, they will tell you that I begged for their help. I did by the way. But I tell you, it is an exaggeration.

In that case, a story about me and how I became a writer is something that would bore you. I promise.

I sat in front of many different models of computers between the years of 2006 until now, and I now have an ass that can rest perfectly flush with a 2×2, quarter-inch piece of particleboard. That’s as exciting as I can make it.

Somewhere in all this time, I have found a true love for the craft. I love looking for the right words. I love finding the right words. I love “feeding my muse” with the copious amounts of books I read. I love listening to music and letting it inspire scenes I write. I love whiskey. I love French Fries. I love Kurt Sutter, and Chuck Palahniuck, and Steinbeck, and Melville. I love Jane Austin, and Ayn Rand.

I love sitting down after I have had a cheese quesadilla and opening my journal of all my world’s lore and creating something new.

And I love it when people read that and enjoy it as much as I did when I wrote it.

Writing is not just a love for your work, but also a love to share it with those who love your work.

And the funny part of that is, if my house is empty and the dogs aren’t barking at any of the neighbors’ dogs, I can sit and produce for hours. With whiskey and french fries, of course.

Well, shit… now I’m going to get some french fries.

I am in rare form today Folks. I am writing this to you in the morning…

I am NOT a morning person, at all.

I have my coffee, black, a granola bar, and a huge glass of water because I can only remember to drink lots of water in the morning. I don’t know where I am going with this. The coffee needs to kick in.

So, New Year’s. Haley was kicking around some ideas for me, and she knew it would be catastrophic to my psyche if we went near anything “reflective” or “resolutionary.” <—(new word). She settled on something I could talk for hours about but limited me, like usual, to 350-ish words. Without further ado, here are the top 5 books I read last year and a TINY explanation why.

Fifth, I read Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin. It was required of me, but I fell in love with the characters, the tension, the backstories, and how Baldwin is real with his ending. That doesn’t mean I liked the ending. I didn’t. But it was real, and sad. A small paperback, it is very worth your time.

Fourth, I did a re-read of Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. I peaked at this when I was in my early twenties, but never really dove into it until this year. Formative and life changing. Very powerful. It influenced my writing more than any other reference book this year, but not mechanically. It changed more of my idea of my writing process and why I do the things I do.

Third, and this one was rough, was There, There by Tommy Orange. This shit had me crying in the last chapters. It was infuriating at the beginning, and by the end, Orange had literally pulled my heart out and stepped on it. Huge emotional responses are amazing for me in fiction, let alone, literary fiction that was published this year. Fantastic book.

Second would be Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. This is a mainstream literary fiction book published last year that garnered a massive following because of the cultural content, but I loved it for a couple of reasons. Strong, admirable male leads are hard to come by, and this book has got a powerful figure. Also, it is a fantasy-type book, with lots of ghosts. Trying not to give it away, but super powerful read that was captivating.

And first, Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths by Darren Naish. It’s no secret that I like to base my mythos around reality and the creatures we have in our own world. When you think about it, whenever someone makes up a new creature, it is still based in our own world with pieces of our own creatures or mythologies woven in. I just think about the people that inhabit my world, and how they would see the creatures that our settlers made up their stories around, and bingo. So, I tend to gravitate to Cryptozoology every once in a while. Plus, they are so fun to read! Fantasy in real life!

Anyway, I promise to be more awake next year, 🙂 and I hope everyone had a safe holiday and is relaxing on the couch while they read this, (or in bed is good too). It’s like 8 degrees in Denver so, that’s nice.