The great floods of 2015 are upon us, and we have been deluged with rain for five days straight now. Not quite the biblical forty days and forty nights, but perhaps enough to back up the sewers. Thankfully we’re on a septic system, so at least we’ve got that going for us.
I started writing when I was about eight. I remember writing a rousing story about an avalanche that swept through a ski resort. No doubt it was a massive rip off of some disaster movie I had seen on TV, but at the time I thought it was the greatest work of literature since Once Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. I loved books as a kid, and read everything I could get my hands on. We moved when I was nine from the sleepy hamlet of Burnham, Maine, with it’s single intersection that had a blinking light, tiny post office and one little general story, to the metropolis of Pittsfield, Maine, population 3,000 and with its own movie theater. Big doings that was. More importantly, it had a nice public library, and I devoured the books therein. I was there so often and took out so many books at a time, reading two or three or four in a weekend, that the librarian would buy things just because she knew I would like them.
I tinkered with writing over the years. I never dedicated myself to it, though, it was a fickle lover and one who could rip out my heart with one careless comment. Such as… “Oh, well, this is OK.” So I dicked around with it from time to time, but froze when I tried to make it something more than a game. I’ve had lots and lots of ideas for stories… I call them scenes, though, because I could get that initial vision on paper, and then I’d never know where to go with it.
Finally, in 2012, I decided to do National Novel Writer’s Month. The object being to write a 50,000 word novel in one 30 day stretch. Working full time, married to my second wife with three boys who visited me on weekends from my first, it was a tough stretch. Let’s just say the initial first two chapters were gold… the rest was decidedly fecal in content. I put it away and didn’t touch it again, that’s how horribly bad I thought it was.
And then something happened. Divorced… dated around for a while… met Jennifer, one of the most awesomely awesome people ever. Fell in love, moved in, got engaged, got married… I think that was the order, but at my age it’s hard to remember exact details. She’s an English teacher by trade, a reader by love, and was encouraging of my revisiting my old lover and trying again. So I did. I took those first two chapters, chucked the rest, decided to mold the story to a three act style with short, snappy chapters… and over the course of the summer of 2015 and into the early fall, I completed it. Mercy Sinclair became a reality, along with her friends and companions, and now I sit with the second (first? Hard to say if so much changed from that 2012 version) draft of a completed novel, one I’m sort of proud of. It’s not crap… it’s not Hemingway by any means, but the thing seems to have some bones.
Jen’s read it, she likes it. I take that as high praise, since she reads Gaimen and Walker, whom I respect a great deal. So I’m starting this site while I begin editing the second draft, and we’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll ever work up the courage to shop it around, and ignore the pains of that old bitch lover who makes me feel like crap when she rejects me. You never know.
Welcome to my site. I’m going to write about lots of stuff, not just writing, so hang on, it’ll get bumpy from time to time. I haven’t blogged in a couple of years. Should be fun.