A Walk Down Memory Lane

Well, this place has been remarkably vacant for far too long. The reason, quite simply, is that my writing life has not only stagnated, it has petered off into oblivion and is croaking weakly in the back of my head. First it was the semester stress that was taking up all of my time writing papers. Then it was the trip to London, where my brain was so busy processing new information and I was so busy seeing the sights and having the time of my life that the idea of sitting still long enough to write was ridiculous--it was a process of collecting experience to store for later use, not a time for reflection.

But now I'm back and running out of excuses. I'm always going to be busy. Gone are the days of my youth when, young and unhindered by work, assignments, and a social life, I could devote hours of my day to writing--and gone, too, is the blind enthusiasm for anything I could churn out which left me un-embarrassed about sub-par work. I've reached the stage of my life and my professional development when I have to make time, have an appointment with myself and keep to it, clocking in to write with the same diligence as any other job. So with that in mind, I worked on creating a schedule that, if I stick to it, should give me time to do everything that needs to get done--now the only issue is keeping up the enthusiasm to do it.

Sometimes I second-guess myself. Sometimes I genuinely feel like I'm just a talentless hack who will end up working temp jobs for the rest of my life because I'm not as good or original as I pretend to be. But that's not an idea I can allow myself to fancy, because, frankly, it's wrong--and more importantly, writing is like food or water for me. Like any addict, I can't live without my writing fix; these past few months, a wordless dryspell, have left me cranky and irritable and feeling unfulfilled. The fact of the matter is, like it or not, I can't stop writing, no more than I can stop thinking. It's part of the fabric of who I am.

I was thinking about writing earlier, about my lifelong relationship with the craft, and was amused to think back on some of the utterly ridiculous stories I wrote as a child. At the time, of course, they were deadly serious to me (as, I suppose, my writing is to me now, which doesn't fare too well for my future) and even then I struggled with annoyance at my inability to write something of the caliber I wanted. Still, there is something refreshing at looking back on it.

So, for anyone who's interested, my writing life-story.

It all started with Tinky.

I have no idea where she came from, or why I created her. She had been with me for the entirety of my memory, possibly for as long as I was capable of imagining--I've heard stories from my parents that I'd had an imaginary friend named Tinky since I was two years old. I would blame things on her and play with her. I've wondered since then what the significance of having an imaginary friend is; I only know one other person who had one, and I had a particularly complex relationship with mine. Tinky was a tigercat, which was basically my own imagination's version of a tiger that lived in a complex social situation and occasionally walked on her hind legs. She had a family and an extensive collection of friends; her brothers Catkik and Kerah, her sister Catherine, her best friend Nightcrawler, her friend King (a wolf), the horses Thunder & Lightning (who had wings and horns), the dogs, whose names I can't seem to recall. They were all animals, at any rate. There were bad guys, Wolfdogs, that lived in Blue Mountain.

When I was about three I can clearly remember playing a game I called "Chasing my Imagination" (a term I vaguely remember learning from my brother); this involved, after making sure I had complete privacy, running around and speaking aloud everybody's parts in whatever the on-going drama was. A lot of the time, especially when I was younger, that drama was based on a movie I had seen or, a little later, a book I'd read; Tinky would invariably be friends with the main character, and we'd have little crossover episodes that would play out. I chased my imagination diligently every day until I was about eight, at which time I started to get a little self-conscious, although it was a form of catharsis that I continued until I was about eleven, in a more abbreviated manner. The last time I chased my imagination was in sixth grade in the living room of an apartment in San Francisco; it mostly involved me, in the character of Tinky, walking around the living room having a conversation with the characters of the Animorphs book. No real action, just lots of chatting.

My parents were concerned for my sanity when I was a little kid, and looking back on it, I suppose I understand why--imaginary friends are one thing, holding onto them well into puberty is something different. Still, I knew exactly where the lines of reality were, and I never brought play into real life; I never made decisions as Tinky, for example, and I understood that I was playing a part. What's interesting is that Tinky wasn't a friend, exactly; I, as myself, never appeared as a character--I became Tinky, and I became every other character. More than anything, it was an escape from myself, a way to try out a new life or new ideas; without fail, if there was something that was troubling me, I'd act out a Tinky story involving that as a way to work through the problem.

Meanwhile, Tinky wasn't my only extensive imaginary play-acting. When I was little, I had stuffed animals--never dolls, always animals--and they had a complicated relationship. Sometimes I'd act out scenes from books with them (the Berenstain Bears were a particular favorite) and change the story around to suit my mood. Later, around 4th grade, I started collecting Puppy In My Pocket, small plastic dog figurines; I have almost the complete set, and they had an even more complex relationship system involving who was friends, enemies, boyfriends, married, children, adopted children, etc. The same went for my horse figurines and all the rest of my toys. The plotlines very closely resemble the roleplaying I do now--but that's getting ahead of myself.

When I was very young, I would make little picture books of Tinky's adventures, but was always annoyed that she never came out the way I imagined her. Drawing, though I've been doing it since I was young and still enjoy it, has never been my forte; the image never looks the way it does in my head. I wanted to see her in a more permanent, shareable fashion, however; she was an important part of my life and I wanted other people to know about and understand her and the world she lived in. I decided around the time I was eight--the same time as I was getting a bit uncomfortable catching my imagination--that I wanted to write a book about her. At the time I had no intention of becoming a writer (my heart was dead-set on being a veterinarian when I grew up)--I just wanted to write this one novel.

I had a few unsuccessful attempts and decided I didn't know how to write. Being rather diligent, I went to the library to find books on writing. One of these, What's Your Story by Marion Dane Bauer, was my favorite and I checked it out about once a month from the library. The suggestions in the book were incredibly helpful, and I followed them religiously--deciding that I should practice with short stories before I tried a novel.

The first problem I encountered was the same problem everyone else has when they start writing: they sit down and say "I'm going to write a story" and then have no ideas for one. So I did what most fledgling writers do--wrote a piece of unoriginal crap. This particular piece of crap was based--no, I can't say that, plagiarized--from a story in Highlights for Children, a magazine I had a subscription to at the time. The original story involved a girl who was bitten by a rattlesnake and was rescued by riding her horse home in time to get help. My story involved....a girl who was bitten by a rattlesnake, whose horse trampled the snake and valiantly conquered it before hauling her unconscious body onto its back and galloping home, er, valiantly. Not much of an improvement.

My parents were rather supportive, though (perhaps because they hadn't read the original story) and I set about trying to write something more interesting. I looked at my writing book. One of the suggestions it made was keeping a writer's journal, which I started to do then and still do now--a journal where you record ideas as they occur to you, questions that come to mind, what-if situations, etc. The first journal was in 1996, when I was ten years old. At any rate, in its discussion of writer's journals, the book mentioned a bit cheekily that you can get to the point where turning off a light switch makes you think of black-outs....and I said to myself, "hey, a blackout, that could be fun."

So I wrote the first of what would be many stories about "Tim and Mikey", best friends with no particular substance or characterization, though I vaguely remember that Tim was sarcastic and Mikey tended to screw things up. In this thrilling adventure, a whole of five handwritten pages on wide-rule school paper, they were home alone with their friend, Samantha, after school during a blackout because their parents were trapped on the chicago subways. Mikey caught the drapes on fire with the kerosene lantern they'd lit because of the blackout, and they had to escape the burning building. I had a bit of a penchant for the dramatic.

My first *real* original story was titled "Bloody Mary" and I was delighted at the brilliance of the title at the time. The story was inspired by a news story I'd heard about women buying guns to protect themselves. I wrote about a woman, conveniently named Mary, who bought a gun for personal defense and accidentally shot her husband, Rob, when he came home from late one night and she thought he was a robber. The story, about two pages front and back on the trusty school wide-rule, ends with Mary in the hospital hearing the proclamation that Rob had died and she was an unwitting murderer. Still over-dramatic as hell, but there was promise in it.

Around this time my parents decided that I really needed to learn how to type, because my handwriting was terrible and I was writing so much, and my ideas came too fast for my handwriting. So I learned how to type. And weirdly enough, my writing started to get better.

There were some exceptions--for example, the idiotic short piece involving a girl who was kidnapped by a cyclops from her parent's minivan and who killed the beast with a hair pick--but overall, the quality of my writing started to improve. There was the story about the guy who thought he was insane who was taken away by the appropriate officials--except he wasn't so much crazy as a space alien, and the officials were taking him away to test him. Wait, did I say my writing was getting better?

Then there was the story about the dobermann who was taunted every day by a white angora cat, until he finally broke off his chain to chase her--only to be hit by a car and reincarnated as a manx cat who spent most of his life trying to avoid getting killed by various things, eventually ending up in a rather familiar situation....teasing a white husky at the end of her leash. I actually rather liked that story, there was a sweet irony to it that I could tease out now that I'm more developed as an author.

Anyway, around this time I decided to write a novel---THE novel, in fact. It was finally time to write Tinky's story, creatively titled The Tigercat. I had a manual typewriter now that my parents bought at a yard sale, and I typed a 72-page manuscript on computer paper, notebook paper, scratch papaer, and anything else I could stuff into it. The story followed Tinky's life as I remembered it, and with a few spiffy new touches I came up with as I went along; she was born, her parents died in a landslide (of all things), she ran away feeling guilty (I swear I actually DID come up with all this before The Lion King, weirdly enough) and had adventurous run-ins with the enemy before coming home to take her place as queen of her people; she had two mates and four children, her brother died, her sister went insane, her other brother defacted to the enemy, her children grew up to fill her shoes. I finished it in February of 1997, sixth grade, in that same apartment where I caught my imagination for the first time. I finished the novel with the death of Tinky--the only ending I could possibly have made--and was horribly depressed for days afterwards. I tried to re-write the ending so that she didn't die, but it didn't matter. I'd given her the death sentence. She was a creature of my imagination, and when I imagined that she died, she did. I caught my imagination for the last time and felt hopelessly empty for about a week, because I'd just cold-heartedly murdered the only friend I'd ever had for the last nine years of my life.

I really thought that was going to be the end of my writing career, since that was the only thing i'd wanted to write...but come to find out, I couldn't quit. I wrote a short story about a flood in a city (not too hard to imagine, since San Francisco was currently underwater, it being the El Nino of '97) that brought people together in unexpected and overdramatic ways, including forging a friendship between two boys in a hospital whose parents had died in the same car crash.

Then there was the Catz trilogy, which started as glorified fanfic of Animorphs but very quickly became its own animal. The original premise (revised numerous times in multiple subsequent drafts) involved four teenagers who worked in a laboratory and were infected with animal DNA and went back in time....later to be four teenagers who found a haunted house and went to another dimension. Either way, the ended up in Hadrian, a place ruled over by the corrupt wizard Xeke and his pet dragons. It was originally conceived in serial form, each episode lasting about ten pages, and I later stitched those together into the first novel, then wrote a sequel and, eventually, a really shitty third book that failed to satisfy me.

While I was working on the Catz trilogy, I also started a series of novels known as the Macbeth High series--a bunch of teen angst books whose defining characteristic was that all of the students went to the same high school. Each novel dealt with a specific issue that was bothering teenagers in the world, or so the nightly news taught me.

The first, Always & Forever, was a story of a girl named Bree who started cutting; she was in an upper-middle-class family and had a perfectly nice, normal life until her best friend had an affair with her boyfriend and later killed herself (there was a planned cross-over story about suicide that I never wrote). Bree started cutting that night and it became an addiction, and she had a rocky relationship with her boyfriend-then-ex for awhile, before plunging into the depths of misery, only to be rescued by the shy, quirky James (....i think his name was James....) whose brother had committed suicide and who started falling in love with her. Bree is almost raped by Cody (an alcoholic--more on him momentarily) and tries to kill herself, ends up in the hospital, James figures out about her cutting and becomes her self-acclaimed therapist who ends up selling his car to take her to prom. Again, overdramatic teen movie material, but I was onto something by this time; hell, I kind of want to resurrect this thing.

Next in the series was All The Power That Stays, a title I rather like; the story involved Cody, the resident boy genius and son of a powerful lawyer and single father. Cody ended up becoming an alcoholic (under rather suspicious situations; as a twelve-year-old, I knew jack-all about alcohol and had no idea how exactly one would start drinking in high school, much less become an alcoholic) and getting kicked out of home, before moving in with Slink (real name, Steven Matches....I love Slink), a guy he met in a bar who befriended him and later kicked him out when Cody's drinking became too much for him. The culmination point is when Cody is sitting on the side of the road with a bottle of whiskey in his hand, homeless and without anything to do in his life, having just tried to rape Bree, and sees a drunk driver plough over a homeless guy. This hits a little close to home and shakes him to the core. He sees a quarter on the side of the road, and walks up to the payphone at the gas station to call his father--who had put a quivering-voiced rendition of a poem Cody had written as an elementary school student up on his answering machine. The story actually ends with the poem, which was a surprisingly sophisticated turn of events, considering my writing history. The novel had a crap plot with no real substance, but I still love the characterization.

Then there was Broken Dreams, about Michael, a black kid who ends up moving in with his older brother Kenneth to get away from his much-hated white cop stepfather. Kenneth is a druggie and Michael ends up a heroin addict who breaks into houses for the cash to get more drugs--aided by a few of Kenneth's buddies, including our pal Slink (who deals but never uses). One night Michael gets capped and his stepfather finds him at the hospital and hauls him home to nurse him through withdrawals, after which time we discover that Michael is HIV positive. Sucks to be him. If I had known a damn thing about drug culture or drugs or AIDS or anything else in the story, it would have been a damn good novel. But....I didn't.

It was while writing this particular novel that I got my first case of writer's block, and I found the website Inkspot, which would change my life.

Inkspot, now defunct, used to be an online bulletin board message forum...thingy...for writers. I made a lot of friends there and thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere; it was the first time in my life I ever had the opportunity to talk to people, especially intelligent people, on a daily basis. We traded reviews and chatted about politics and religion, and I made one lasting friend there who I still talk to on a regular basis even though the site is long gone and dead.

Formal writing went on hiatus around this time. I'd floated some copies of the various novels (mostly the Catz trilogy) around the publishing world, without much success (though I did get an encouraging rejection from Atheneum), but was largely frustrated because I had a huge body of work and no place to send it. I spent most of high school editing the books I already had, and working on the new third installment of Catz, "Into The Apocalypse" which I never finished. I was at a crucial point in my life, one of those experience-not-reflect periods, and I was still dead set on being a veterinarian.

I kept from going insane around this time by roleplaying. I started roleplaying in 2000, and found it remarkably familiar--it was pretty much exactly like catching your imagination, only with more people. I'm still an avid roleplayer.

The problem is that as a general rule, I can either roleplay or write seriously, but I can rarely do both at the same time with any enthusiasm. So I didn't do much real writing. Then I decided i was going to quit RPing around the time I went to college, and that was a really terrible idea. My current, much healthier, notion, is to write every day and roleplay when the mood takes me, separating the two things out--writing is a career and passion, RPing is a hobby that draws on the same skills. That, and the more I RP the more I realize just how easy it is to pillage roleplays for story material.

That pretty much catches us up with the present. I got the idea for Carnal Jesus, my current novel, in October of 2003. I lost the first half of it to a harddrive crash and have had a hard time resurrecting it, and am losing hope, because it's never taken me this long to finish a novel. I have to remind myself, though, that I've never written anything this long, this well-fleshed-out, or, frankly, this GOOD. This really is my first real novel in a lot of ways; I cut my teeth on the others, but this is something altogether different. Although, if I never finish it, I'll never know if it was worth all the time, now will I?

I've written a couple of short stories since then, though it's taken some effort to remember how to write short fiction. I got a rejection from Nimrod International yesterday on "Monologue" and will be aggressively sending it out again shortly. I'm still waiting on a response from PBQ for "Angelfish", and I need to finish "Flowers for Lily". I have a short story brewing about a guy who wakes up in a morgue after being mis-diagnosed as dead, and need to get that rolling as well.

Also...there are a few stories I want to resurrect. Tim & Mikey are a lost cause, but I did write some other good stuff. There was a story about a Navajo boy whose family was poor, who was a grassdancer; he went to a Pow-Wow to dance competetively and was under huge pressure because his father, paralyzed from some sort of accident, used to be a great dancer and because his family really needed the money--and the guy, whose name is evading me, ended up having to bow out of competition because he was exhausted. I had a whole series planned out for him and his buddy, and in hindsight...they were actually pretty decent stories. There's a lot of potential in Always & Forever, melodramatic though it is; I could brush that off, make it darker and less of a morality play, and probably find a good home for it. The same goes for other Macbeth High books--not only the three I've written, but some of my other ideas...the disabled would-be basketball hero who ends up training a wannabe, only to live vicariously through him and push him to the point of self-destruction sticks out particularly well. The Catz trilogy will live on, in some form, because I'm too damn obsessed with the characters; Jack, the unwitting anti-hero of the trilogy, is to date one of my favorite characters and the first person I've ever written who I fell in love with.

Hell, I even plan on dusting off Tinky, yet again, and re-writing her story in a sort of dark metaphorical fantasy piece that reflects on politics and war.

And, my friends, it seems we've come full circle. Maybe there's hope for me yet.