My Writing, Then and Now

“It’s like one of those highlights episodes, but weird”

In case you missed it, I need a literary agent.  I need someone to sell my light-fantasy historical gothic horror gay romance action adventure novel to publishers because I’m sure that there’s a market for that somewhere, they just don’t know it yet.  But German vampires aren’t the only thing I write about; in fact, I consider myself a pretty versatile writer, and I’ve been writing and telling stories for about as long as I can remember.

In fact, my mom tells me that I would often make up stories to pass the time on the long car ride to and from my grandmother’s house.  Apparently, these stories usually involved my brother, my stuffed animals, Harry Potter and friends, the Scooby-doo gang, and myself.  I would ramble on for an hour or more, just talking nonsense about the adventures that we’d get into, often in spooky mansions or castles.  And my mom, she tells me, would smile and nod along and do her best to pretend like she was paying attention.

I don’t blame her (my mom, that is).  Somewhere in the bowels of our house, my dad has an old home movie of me telling one of my famous stories.  It’s about fifteen minutes long, damn near impossible to understand through my impeded childish speech, and has zero internal consistency or plot structure.  I tried to sit through it myself and barely survived.  Maybe it’s different for parents, but it takes something superhuman for my mom to sit trapped in a car for an hour while I jumbled gibberish.  Every week.

I like to think my stories have gotten better since then.  They no longer contain characters from other works, except for that one story about Mark Watney I had to write because I was paid to write it.  The events of my stories are now logical and follow a cause-and-effect pattern, with action having bearings on the world of the story and the arcs of the characters therein.  And there’s actually deeper meaning in most of my stories beyond “this happened and then this happened and wow there’s a giant bat and ope Ron’s dead now.”

Or, at least, that’s what I try to believe.  You, dear reader, can be the judge of that for yourself because over the course of this entire summer I’ll be posting a massive backlog of stories that I’ve written over the years.  I’ve done it twice before, here and here, and now, as back then, I’ll be posting these stories because I don’t have the time to write a full post.  Why won’t I have time for the entire summer?  Because I’ll be in New Mexico.

I’ve talked about it a bit now, but it’s really becoming very real for me because I leave in less than a week, depending on when I post this.  From late May until late August, I’ll be working at Philmont Scout Ranch in the southern Rocky mountains, where I will be a living history interpreter for Human Scouts of all ages and origins.  My boss says I get to dress up like Indiana Jones and sing “Big Rock Candy Mountain” for three months.  And I get paid for it, too.  Honestly, I’m thrilled.

But, since I’ll be in the backcountry almost every day for the entirety of my summer, I won’t have access to internet much of the time.  Which is absolutely fine with me; the internet kind of scares me anyway (Be careful with that link; it’s Garfield).  But everyone on the web tells me that the key to blog success is consistent quality content, so my best plan is to schedule many blogs in advance for my summer.  That way I can at least guarantee the consistent part.  And wouldn’t you know it, I’ve got a couple dozen stories laying around.  It’s a great way to make some rough copyright protection and share my work with the world.

But this will all come later.  Right now I’ve got a little bit of time before I’m off the grid, so I wanted to give a little bit of context to all these stories before I started unloading them like unsuspecting cattle.  So let me talk about my writing.

My writing has evolved over the years, as any author hopes.  Long gone, as I said before, are the days of my endless road trip stories.  But the transition was a slow one, and I guess that makes sense since I started this kind of stuff when I was three years old.  I remember writing a science-fiction story in first grade about scuba divers who had to retrieve a giant squid for their local aquarium.  I used more lined paper than I was allowed by my teacher.

After that came Team Guinea Pig, my greatest work of all time that shall never be rivaled by anything else I do for as long as I live.  That’ll get its own article next week.  I started that project in second grade, and worked on it here and there for my grade school years.  And also during that time, I would meticulously take notes on every idea I thought of that might make for a good story.

I suffer from a very mild form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which is different from my depression and also different than how the media portrays it.  I’ve been very lucky in that my OCD tends to make me a perfectionist to a fault as opposed to someone who picks up every piece of lint they see. This keeps me organized and allows me to succeed in school, but takes a toll in other ways.  The biggest way is that I keep a daily journal and obsessively take notes on everything.  Sometimes this is good.  Sometimes this is very, very bad.  Sometimes it fills my computer with a bunch of meaningless word documents that only have the title of a prospective story and nothing else.

My brother and his girlfriend once asked me to go through some of my old writing folders, things I hadn’t touched since 7^th or 8^th grade.  What I found both surprised and entertained me.  I had a huge folder full of short story and novel ideas, mostly horror-based, that I thought would be fun to write.  I had a series of novels about Cryptids, where each novel focused on a different one.  I had bizarre, single-word names for books like “Fangs,” “Bones,” “Benjamin,” “Caverns,” “Cemetery,” “Oily,” “Paralyzed,” “Divide,” “Idol,” “Vampira,” and more.  If there was a word that sounded spooky enough, I probably have a word document novel template about it.

The thing is, though, that most of these documents are empty except for the titles I gave them.  Some have cursory notes, like Oily has this: “Evil society, Pies, oil crazed villains, dragon king, ‘it found us,’ monsters, the puzzle (literally, like piece by piece puzzle), Chapter title: of planes and parabolas,” [sic].  Others have basic outlines, like a table of contents.  One book that I might still actually write one day about a summer camp plagued by demons had chapter titles like “In the Beginning,” “Ben the Muncher,” “Ghoul?,” and “All Hell Breaks Loose, Literally.”  Ben the Muncher is my favorite thing now.

Oh, yeah, and then there’s Dragon Storm.

Of all the things that I could bear to poke through at my brother’s insistence, Dragon Storm was the most entertaining.  I had written a little bit of it, probably in 5^th or 6^th grade, and it sounded exactly like what a 5^th or 6^th grader would write.  Here’s some choice quotes:

“I continue looking out the window, beginning to see the huge storm my parents are chasing.  Being Weather Men and Woman, it’s their job to chase these things.”

“Something emerged from the light.  It was a dragon.  It was orange and yellow, like fire.  It beckoned to me, and then it spoke.  ‘This storm is not a normal storm.  It is a Dragon Storm,’ it said.  It then took my hand, and began leading me off the plane.  I stepped into the storm.”

“I woke from my sleep in a cold sweat.  I looked at the clock.  3:30.  Great.  Once again, my odd dreams had woke me up very early.  I looked around.  It seemed they had also woke up my brother.  He was looking at with his great big puppy-dog eyes.  In them I could see confusion, a small amount of anger, and some fear.  I had been mumbling again. ‘Noah, you were mumbling again,’ Danny said.”

I then go on to talk about Dragon Eggs, the end of the world, and describe a fictional town that was actually just the town that I lived in at that time.  My brother and I realized that I was essentially writing about myself in a fictional world.  This all happens in the first three pages, mind you.

I couldn’t work up the nerve to poke through more of the trash heap that sits in my Archive of Least Promise folder on my laptop.  But my work does get better from there.  At some point I started writing The Time Keepers, a high science-fiction novel starring my lunch table from junior high and an omnipotent time god.  I actually wrote several novel’s worth of material for that.  But I’ll talk about it next week.

It was about when I got to high school that I actually started to take my writing seriously.  I had a “Come to Jesus” moment, as my mom likes to say, where I realized that I wouldn’t be happy in my life if I didn’t at least try to do something with my knack for storytelling. So I decided that I would pursue it for as long as I was able to.  This was about the time that I wrote an absurdist comedy play that I wanted my high school to perform.  They didn’t do it, but as I’ve been told by several people, my play was significantly funnier than whatever tripe they put on that year instead.  But I’m not sour about that, no, not at all.  I don’t hold a deep-seated resentment about that at all, a lingering wonder and regret about what it could have been.  I hold no hard feelings.

So since high school, and now into college where I study it as part of my major, I take my creative writing a little bit more seriously.  Like I said, I wrote that one play.  I’ve written two movie scripts since then, both of which I think are pretty solid.  I’ve penned that novel I keep telling everybody about.  I’ve written several short stories, some of which have even won awards, but I’ll get more into that later.  And I continue to come up with ideas for the future, more novels or stories or movies or plays or musicals or video games or TV shows or blog posts that I could write.  And, hopefully, some of them are even good.

I hesitate to describe in greater detail much of what I’m currently working on, since everything is as-of-yet unpublished and I think it’s a little tacky to say I’ve written novels and movies if I haven’t sold them yet.  And also copyright reasons.  But then again, writing isn’t always for an audience, as my creative writing professors tell me.  I personally think that’s a little bullshit, since I’ve also been told that writing is always for an audience, even if sometimes it’s just you.  Point is that most writers can’t seem to agree on anything, so might as well do whatever the hell you want.

I think I’ve taken that to heart, this sentiment that you can’t really go wrong with writing as long as you write.  I’ve always been drawn to telling stories, in one form or another, and I think that as long as I keep telling these stories I’ll find satisfaction in the act of writing, whether I’m published or not.  That being said, you can’t buy a sandwich with an unpublished manuscript, but that’s what day jobs are for.

So I write, and I continue to write.  I plan to write a lot over the summer at Philmont.  I’ll be writing in these cool leather-bound journals that I was gifted for my high school graduation, and for the first time in forever, I’ll be using an actual pen to write a story.  Someday maybe I’ll get somewhere with it.  Maybe not.  But who’s to say?  If you had told 6^th grade me that college me would be laughing at the trash he’d written, he’d probably cry and not believe you.  But it was still writing; it was formative trash, and it helped make my writing what it is today.  So the best thing to do is keep writing.  Maybe in ten years I’ll look back on this and think “What the hell was I doing?” But if I don’t keep writing, I’ll never improve, and I’ll never know for sure what I can become.