A Flighty Writer... the Story of How I Came to Write - Part 1

'Under the Wall' is my first 'real' novel, and I began writing it December 3rd, of 2009. That should set off some light bulbs in your head, to the effect that I can't possibly be very experienced at writing.

Note, however, the quotes around 'real.' Those quotes are the true operant word in that sentence, so to speak. I have always loved to write, though for long years I didn't operate in the traditional, narrative prose mode whatsoever. Instead, I made strange, jangly word collages or massive, prose-like blocks of stream-of-consciousness word miasma. Looking back at this long phase of my writing life, I have to wonder what was going through my head - did it benefit me to form formless word sculptures, or was it some strange aberration formed by indulgence and a lack of mental firmness?

I have long been held enrapt by stories, and was frequently teased in my younger years in school for my 'bookwormy' nature. Even as a child I frequently began to write narrative stories - almost invariably sequels to the books I found most engaging. The longest effort I had undertaken was at age nine, a sequel to the 'Rats of NIMH' books by Robert C. O'Brien (continued by his daughter, Jane Leslie Conley in the remarkable 'Racso and the Rats of NIMH' and less spectacular 'RT, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH').

This attempt at a sequel to a property that was not mine fizzled out after a few chapters - chapters which may have been only a few hundred words each. I didn't try to tell a true, non-satirical narrative, save for a few isolated efforts, for years.

Looking back, I have to wonder why. I read more and more books, and sought more and more creative outlets in my life - yet the formation of words, the thing which came most easily to me and felt most expressive, was only approached through alternate routes... such as lyric writing, poetry, or more and more often these strange, word-salady blobs of paragraph-formatted lines - usually so purposely disjointed, thematically and grammatically, that to attempt to read a page so cloyed the mind with jagged syllables and empty meanings that even -I- have seldom looked this writing over after it was composed.

Somehow, it was the mere act of it that I found enjoyable - the end product was a wash, a waste. The pages I had at the end of the day were like an ashtray full of cigarette butts - a byproduct rather than a result.

It took me a few more years before I realized that the 'act' of it could be more enjoyable still if I got to a place where I could enjoy the result of my work, and not just the process of forming sentences and putting them down. Some of my work groped towards meaning, the rest seemed to rejoice in its meaningless as though it knew its time was soon to come - my nonsense, knowing it had only months to live, partied like it was 1999, basically.

Then, the unthinkable happened - I began to write stories. This happened in the most ridiculous, backhanded way possible. Looking back at the dawn of my 'career' as a fiction writer, I can't help but laugh at the sheer serendipity of it - the nonsensical way that I almost tricked myself into wanting to do what has since become my main passion. You see, my first book (the mercifully out-of-print 585 page curiosity 'GhostPopulace, Vol. 1') began as a prank: a simple prank, and nothing more.

The first 'chapter' composed for this book was originally made to be a submission to a paranormal website where users could post their own photos and first-hand supernatural experiences for others to see and read. This idea amused me, particularly since the photos were of things like dust blobs, or nothing, and showed zoomed in details of a tree that were supposed to look like faces or demons but in fact looked like extremely grainy tree-bark, and the stories were so over-the-top (or empty of content, alternately) as to be obviously untrue - not believed even by the posters. (Either 'demons came out and yelled at me and my friends, and they looked like they were on fire!' or 'I could swear I heard something but there was nothing there,' in other words).

If we truly lived in a world where even half of these people's stories were half true, there would be no debate about the existence of ghosts. Currently there is no valid scientific proof of ghosts - but such an issue would be moot if the world were as full of haunts as these people would have you believe. Most amusing to me, many of them had dozens of comments from people claiming to be 'terrified' by the images and tales others had posted, or little notes from folks claiming to be 'convinced' by the grainy, insubstantial photos.

This seemed to me to be a great opportunity - how absurd of a fake photo and story could I make and still get comments like these? From what I was seeing - fairly absurd. I set about photoshopping cuts of meat onto crash test dummie's feet and hands, making a bloody-stumped, floating apparition with glowing red eyes couched in a dim forest. My photoshop skills are no match for my limited writing abilities, and I can tell you right now that the image you have of this photo in your mind is likely ten times more realistic than that which I sent, along with my 'personal account,' to the site.

In retrospect, I don't know what first flagged the attempt as clearly fake - the obviously fake photo or the even more obviously preposterous story. If there is a narrative equivalent of a poorly photoshopped image cobbled from lots of public-domain parts, then this written submission was it.

Alien landing site? Check. Dark, frightening forest filled with voices of the dead? Check. String of serial murders in the seventies? You bet your ass. Indian burial ground? Why the hell do you think it was an alien landing site?

As you can see, this wasn't a brilliant composition. I didn't have a 'eureka' moment where I saw something from a new angle and realized I had a story to tell. Like the pages of word salad, this was a largely excretive process, consisting of binding together well-worn story elements in a flimsy shell. My motivations were simply to amuse myself with a ridiculous prank - and to that end I succeded.

I did not succeed, however, in getting the article or photo printed, even on a site that was full of obvious tripe. Had I sent a picture of a mere tree in to the editor, claiming that there were clearly demons capering in the blocky pixels around its base, I would have assuredly gotten on. But, in pushing the boundaries, I was instantly found out. It made me wonder why the clear fake of something interesting was less valuable to them than boring photos of blurry houses and dusty hallways, but I think I understand - at least with the ambiguity of the blurry images they can pretend they believe.

In any event, I found that making a ridiculous ghost story was rather fun. I had just read a very strange book about alternate theories of science and history that was filled with a lot of interesting theories by folks about why established science was wrong about things like the ages of the pyramids and the like, and that had influenced me to a degree to write the next prankish work - a revelation that scientist Nikola Tesla was actually dread demigouge Tezzlar Nikkolat - a terrifying being who had been found in portraits dating back hundreds of years before Tesla's supposed birth.

I just meant this to be a one-off joke, the idea that Tesla was actually an evil being named 'TezzLAR' seemed so funny to me, but the actual 'story' was little more than a brief paragraph asserting that yes, it's true: he's actually an evil being. In other words, it was more of a synopsis or argument than a story, rather along the lines of 'Hey, did you hear? The president is actually a robot!'

Now I had two ridiculous 'submissions,' this one even more tongue-in-cheek than the last, and no self-respecting site would host either of them. I didn't even bother trying to get the Tezzlar story posted (which also came with a photoshopped image of Tesla made to look, in theory, like an 16th-century painting). My solution was simple - create my own site.

I already ran a website for my music, and just made a sub-domain for the ghostly stuff. I used my considerable word salad skills to come up with a seemingly meaningless (at least context-less) name for the site: GhostPopulace.

I began to make a few more stories, all supposedly submitted by fictional people, and post them up. I did this at my old job, where I sat about and wrote during my long shifts as a sort of doodle. (This is where I amassed hundreds of manuscript pages of gobbledygook.) Some of the stories stopped being nearly as 'pranky,' and my writing quickly became attempts to tell short but interesting ghost stories rather than make cliche-ridden jokes.

Not that these stories, the first real narrative stories I had ever tried to write, were entirely devoid of cliches. The one of the first 'real' stories was about an answering machine that played back the message that the person on the other end of the phone really meant, what they are really thinking inside their heads, not what they say.

A machine like that is all fine and well when the revelations amount to nothing more than realizing that your landlord thinks your wife is hot, your video store clerk reminding you that not only are your movies overdue, but he thinks you are an idiot for racking up fines instead of just downloading the movies illegally, or that your friend really cancelled the poker game because his girlfriend was horny. The real meat of the story is when a call from their building repairman clues the couple in to the sick fact that he means to kill them both with a wrench when he comes to fix their pipes later that day.

This was the only thing that saved the young couple, and ever after the answering machine only left regular messages, like every other machine.

It sounds passable as a first effort, I suppose - though looking back I'm sure I could turn this interesting idea into a better realized story. At the time, I was deliberately writing these all in the style of a 'report,' a submission made by real people to a real website. It seemed to be part of the fun. At first, I would write about two of these short tales a day, in longhand, during an eight hour shift. Then I would type them up when I got home (coincidently, I lived in an apartment just above the office where I worked).

It didn't take too many weeks before I would work on one story for a few days, instead of just a few hours. After I had a few of these longer stories, I began to cross-pollinate. Tezzlar returned - this time witnessed by a couple on their way to a friend's wedding. The dread Tezzlar was driving a truck hauling a tarped-over trailer out behind. The couple see a strange, two-thumbed blue hand fall out of this tarp - and try their best to speed away. Just their luck - the same crazy guy pulls into their hotel later down the road and gets the room right next to them for the night.

Listening fearfully through the wall, the hapless young couple hear Tezzlar force the Armadillo creature's mind out of its body, and switch places with it. There's a terrible fight between the creature in the erudite 19th century gentleman's body and the ancient evil of Tezzlar in the electric-blue armadillio-creature's powerful frame - and the couple probably crapped themselves as it happened. If I remember correctly, the story ends with the new Tezzlar-dillo being flying into the sky, with powers immeasurable, off to commit some grave new injustice.

That was the turning point of the story, and quickly threads that had no common denominator before wrapped and wove about themselves. Other beings in the story had goals, the most frightening of which would have to be the Candleholder - a strange, seven-foot bald demon with pointed ears who enters our world through a doorway of blood sacrifice once every hundred years - except the ritual had gone wrong this time - the sacrifice was too good, in other words - and he had been let out for good. It ends up that he had rather ambitious goals, none of which proved favorable to humans.

The ridiculousness didn't stop there - a race of lizard people known as the Lacertillians had been imprisoned below the sea since the advent of flowering plants (to which they are fatally allergic) forced them under the surface. When a well-meaning group of young marine scientists accidentally enter their underwater realm on a deep-sea diving expedition, it gives them the chance they've been waiting for since the age of the dinosaurs to take a stab at reclaiming the surface.

Oh, and since we mentioned dinosaurs... A major role is played in the story by the ghosts of dinosaurs, their energy living on in the fossil fuels in the earth. (I think this has been proven wrong since then, and oil doesn't come from dinosaurs. Oops.) It ends up that they are getting weaker and weaker, and why? Because all the gasoline we are using up is burning off their psychic energy. So what? What does that matter anyway? They're already dead!

Well, it seems that the ghosts of dinosaurs are the only natural predator for the galaxy-encircling horde of aliens that pass by this way about every 200,000 years. If the dinosaurs aren't there to stop them, they'll eat us all up this time. They're on their way, man - better go find out how to save those dinosaurs!

The cast of 'good guys' is huge in this book. It had to be, given the scope - many of these stories are 'submitted' by fictional characters that don't know each other at first, and the plot is frequently advanced by one-off characters who don't figure in later, such as the young couple or an old farmer who notices the Tezzlar-dillo creature eating his pigs like a chupacabra. The story has at least three main villains if you don't count the alien horde. For something that began as a joke, it had ended up being an intensely complex work.

Sititng here writing about it now, it sounds like its pretty good, doesn't it? The plot certainly sounds action-packed. The problem was that I had had zero prior practice as a prose writer. It wasn't even until around the fourth story I had written for the book that I even began trying to write 'real' stories - I had literally begun writing the book before I realized

A) It was for a book
B) It could be something I could try to make good
C) That these could, with effort, be real stories and not just pranks.

Hardly conducive to sudden literary greatness. Still, it got me doing something I had always wanted to do but never quite realized - writing stories.

At this phase in my life I was disengaging myself from the musical aspirations that had defined my teenage and young adult years, and was very surprised indeed to find that I had begun to enjoy something that seemed so different from the main artistic outlet I had been working within for over a decade.

I began writing a second book immediately, even as I managed to sell all 85 copies of my initial run. (That 'GhostPopulace, Vol. 1,' a book began as a prank, has so far sold more than four times as many copies as 'Under the Wall' depresses me, but not too much.) Still, I stopped myself, even after I got some really good ideas and had developed them enough to use. Something stayed my hand - I felt this strange sense that 'if I keep doing this now, I'll just do it forever,' something that should have been reassuring and encouraging but at the time made me feel cautious and nervous.

I saved the work I had begun on the second book, thankfully - and now I am very glad I did not finish it at the time, because the central plot conceit of the second book will go on to be the plot of what should be my fourth book and third novel, sometime next year. I'm sure it will be better realized for the wait.

But from 2007 to 2009, I wrote only a book of poetry, 'Scattered Lights.' And that was in February of 2007, less than half a year after the release of 'GhostPopulace.' So for long years I was dormant as a writer - particularly as a prose writer.

I read precious little during that time save non-fiction. My interests pulled me in a million different directions but I never felt that I crystallized on the artistic outlet that I required - I felt increasingly non-artistic, non-producing. I couldn't find the sort of story-spark that had made me such a voracious reader of tales in my youth during this time. Upon beginning 'GhostPopulace,' my constant fiction reading for some reason stopped, and it never started again until September of 2009, through a happy chance.

I remembered a story from my youth that had terrified me: terrified me. Sitting, at age nine, in my dark basement at two A.M. I finished reading a story that filled me with such inexpressible fear and unreasoning horror that, though enthralled through and through with the tale (many elements of which I never forgot in the intervening 16 years) I didn't dare pick up another book by that author at the time.

There was magic in it, for one thing - not the wizards and wands kind at all, but the real kind. The power of childhood, of the mind, of the heart, of the word, and of belief. There was a sort of noble power coursing through the story, through the tones, through the words. Even through the evil in the story a sort of undeniable power seemed to flow.

That story was 'The Library Policeman' and that author was Stephen King. I remembered this story fondly one day in September 2009, and resolved to re-read it and see if it was really as terrifying as my nine-year old self believed it to be.

It was just as scary, though I was pleased to note that I could at least still function afterwards - age has some improvements apparently. What's more, I noticed things in it - things I probably perceived roughly at age nine but which now shone out at me from the text like beacons.

I had to read more of this author, and soon. I had read only 'Four Past Midnight,' 'Skeleton Crew,' both in fifth grade, and much later 'The Shining.' I decided to choose a famous work by him I knew only a little about, but enough to realize that in terms of scares it was a pretty safe bet.

Everybody, everybody, knows someone who is deathly afraid of clowns - and in almost every case it all stems back to one thing, back to one common, shared reason alone.

My decision of books may have been made lightly, with me simply wanting to chose a work that had a good chance at terrifying me, but the result was anything but. Just a few pages in and my life was changed forever.

That was the last week of September, 2009 - since then I have read over seventy books and written almost two. My, what one spark can do to a big pile of dead wood!


That was Part 1, where I explain how I rekindled my literary bent. In Part 2 I will look at how, as I began setting out on this new literary adventure, I became once more ensnared in the pen.

The Advent of a New Discourse

This marks my initial foray into the sort of author's blog I will need to have at some point anyway. Why not start now? I will not let things such as the lack of a firm topic stop me - precisely because I do in fact have a topic to complain about.

You will find that my posts here will consist in roughly equal measures of updates of my work, ravings about the works of others I am currently enjoying, and petty complaints about mundane aspects of human life. Of the three, I will likely seem most impassioned when it comes to complaints. I don't feel this is truly the case - I think that the minor annoyances of the daily human world are the only area of life I do not have a satisfactory outlet for - the deeper issues are taken care of by the whirling twin lawnmower blades of creation and absorption that join at the axle of Work - my own and others'. Some of the shoots and buds of annoyance get clipped by those shears, but only through sheer chance. The rest, dear reader, shall be dealt with only with your assistance.

I will not, you see, ever wish to write a story only about how irritated I am with people standing on escalators. I might force a character to complain about such things, and I probably will - but I do not wish, on the whole, to pepper my work with my own petty pet peeves. Not when I could condense them into a gruel of pure maligned entitlement and spew that soup of anger here for you all to lap up like hungry dogs!

My first complaint, I think, sums up all my others and contains them within itself. It is this: Other pedestrians seem to believe they exist in a vacuum, and that only their goals matter in the scheme of things. This line of thinking is the cause of sixty to eighty percent of all my life's woes, at least.

Let's look at a few quick, easy to understand diagrams.

Diagram 1



Now, this problem affects me perhaps more than it would people in most American cities, or indeed most cities in the world. Why is this? I live and work in the Twin Cities, Minnesota - and downtown Minneapolis features the world's largest continuous 'skyway' structure. What these amount to, basically, are a labyrinthine array of hallways that connect each building, joining over the street in glass-encased elevated walkways, but mostly consisting of winding halls the like of which most people never encounter outside of a video game. These halls are a breeding ground of thoughtless pedestrian habits. The first diagram shows the most common of these.

When one see that someone is in front, off center slightly, walking down the aisle, and adjusts ones own angle accordingly to pass this rude individual without causing them any problem and just leave the whole ordeal in the past, these rude folk veer wildly, seeming glimpsing you out of the back of their head and making the necessary steps to cut you off again. 'That's ok,' I think, 'I've only walked an additional 20 feet out of my way to get around this person, what do I care if they meander back and forth and cause me to stare at the back of their complacent head all day?'

The answer is: I care plenty.

As soon as you get around a pedestrian of this sort, the next is already there, zigging and zagging their way to whatever place they evidently don't feel driven to get to.

Diagram 2



There are those who do not zag, do not zig, and clearly think themselves the very bastions of proper, linear walking. Do not be fooled, for these people are worse than death itself. They are 'Those Who Would Pass, But Lack the Speed.'

It starts off naturally enough, or so it would seem: a person or group of people walking together come up behind another person or group, and move over as if to go around. These people have often been walking directly behind the person in front for minutes, but that doesn't stop them. They suddenly decide 'here's my chance to make a break for it.' The problem? They never make the break. They simply scoot over, take up space, and walk along at the exact same speed.

This still happens in cars, where there are actually laws about passing lanes and requirements to get started. You will frequently find somebody cruising along in the passing lane at excruciatingly slow speeds, often with a mile-long line of cars strung up behind them, the driver of each flinging a well-aimed finger at the occupant of that oblivious first car.

In pedestrian traffic, these oblivious wanderers through life are often even less aware then their motorized counterparts. I frequently have no other option save to dart around these people, looking as though I feel I am suddenly playing some type of contact sport while those around me, frequently the very same people whose rudeness has forced me to stoop to these unseemly measures, look at me as though I am odd.

As soon as they can tell me how my darting around their self-centered clog in order to get on with my day is as rude as slowing people down out of sheer laziness and selfishness, I might rethink my actions.

As it stands, let them stare.

Diagram 3



In our final pedestrian peeve of the day, we look at portals - those largely rectangular keepers of the inside and outside worlds. Sane people have little trouble understanding how to go both in and out of doors. The average pedestrian, far from sane, seems to think of doors as a unique opportunity to take up as much space as possible without gaining any more weight (that will have to wait until they get home, most likely).

By thrusting their way through at as sharp an angle as the door will allow (in double doors, that angle is quite large indeed) only one person can cut off up to six people walking abreast of each other in a single line. Considering how groups of people could be entering and leaving at the same time, and the relative 'functional area' of an average double-doorway, one rude person on a harsh angle can cut off twelve people: three groups of two people going in, and three groups of two going out.

That's a lot of power to anger in just one lazy person, so you can see why they must be subconsciously drawn to this technique.

Final Argument

My theory for why there is such tension between the lazy and the driven is based on 'conflict theory.' We see two seprate, conflicting sets of values between those who meander slowly, not caring how quickly they get where they are going, what path they take to get there, or how many people they get in the way of while they do it, and those who are walking briskly, destination in mind, doing their best to take the shortest (and thus most efficient) path while not getting in anyone's way.

The lazy folk who walk with no awareness of their impact on others want the same thing as the driven folk who want to reach their destination as quickly as possible: the efficiency of the shortest possible path.

The lazy value this efficiency because to take the shortest possible path will save them steps (which burn calories, thus requiring effort) and enable them to focus on what matters to them most - ignoring everything around them while gesturing wildly with the hand not clutching their cellphone to their head, heedless of any people nearby they might be flinging their gesticulating hand into.

For the lazy, by walking at the slowest pace down the most efficient path, they get where they are going with the least effort.

The driven value this efficiency because in their quest to accomplish all of their goals in as effective a manner possible, they have identified the shortest possible path as the one which saves them the most time.

By walking at maximum pace down the shortest possible path, the driven can reach their goals as quickly as possible and move on to what's next.

The self same efficiency is valued between both the lazy and the driven, however this causes driven folks to be constantly thrown up against lazy pedestrians whose rude, selfish manner makes them little more than living obstructions - creating a clash in which the people who value speed and efficiency are slowed down by those who simply value laziness and ease.

There is no 'right' or 'wrong' in this matter, though I have to say that the lazy folks seem to care so little about what they do or where they are going that for them to claim walking in a less selfish manner is somehow disrupting their lives would be a stretch. I have no problem seeing how someone with a place to go being slowed down by rude person after rude person might wish that these individuals be a little more thoughtful about where and how they walk.

Ultimately, that's all we really want of you, oh selfish hordes that throng the skyways and streets of the world - be a little more thoughtful. Please.


Join me next time, where I might talk about my writing. In fact, I'm almost sure of it!