Recently Chessny Silth granted me the
Kreativ Blogger Award.
It was actually the first sign I had she read The Bathroom Monologues, and in
terms of first-signs, it’s pretty high up there.
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| (SIC) |
The blog game comes with the fairly standard request for stories.
In this case, ten details about myself. Since I’ve run a few of these already,
this time I’ll try to restrict myself to only listing things about writing. And
I promise not to list “I’m writing another novel” as one of them.
1. My class in second grade was paired up with fifth graders
to learn about and write “Historical Fiction.” My fifth-grader educated me that
it was any story set in real history but with events that didn’t really happen.
Within seconds, I asked if that meant we could write about George Washington
riding Godzilla into the Revolutionary War. She seemed enthused to explore the
topic.
2. I Mary-Sued my way into at least two things in
middle-school. I will not admit which, but if you guess them in the Comments, I
will fess up.
3. I still use composition notebooks. I believe I was the
only person carrying one at the last writing convention I attended. I even ran
into a senior citizen who wrote on an IBM ThinkPad, and was very defensive about his device being seen as too old-fashioned.
4. By the end of high school, the longest thing I had
written was 180 pages of an unfinished novel based on Broli from Dragon Ball Z.
No, I am not in it. No, you may not read it.
4. At a certain point my family computer was corrupted and I
lost my digital copy of that Broli novel. It turned out the floppy I’d used was
also damaged. It was a year later when I discovered a printed copy of the novel
in an old teacher’s filing cabinet, stole it, and re-typed the entire thing,
adding improvements and extending the story as I went along.
5. It was while walking between classes one day that I gave
up on the Broli novel. I had the epiphany that all of the things I most wanted
to write weren’t my invention. Lord of the Rings, X-Men and Dragon Ball Z were
neat worlds with appealing characters, but they were all someone else’s worlds
and characters. I felt annoyed that I should have to invent my own, especially
since those three concepts were already taken.
6. Before Sophomore year in college, I was unaware anyone on
earth disdained Louis L’Amour. I was stunned that anyone had the free time to
both read a bunch of Westerns and systematically hate them. That really opened
up the way academics look at literature for me.
7. One of the most formative lessons I got in college was a
comparative literature assignment, pitting two articles against each other. The
first was by a popular thriller writer I won’t name, who was generally
perceived on campus as utter rubbish. His article described his writing process
as exciting, joyous, and altogether like a daily Christmas unwrapping session.
The second was by an author whose name has long escaped me, but whom was deeply
literary, and who described her process as dreadful, tense, and decried that
she had never once enjoyed writing – only having written. The experience was
revelatory and demanded I figure out where in-between these two I’d want my
process and my work to fall.
8. I took such a heavy course load in college that
eventually I ran out of free time to write anything of my own. I became afraid
that after graduation I’d be unable to write anything without a professor’s
prompt, and so began the exercise of the Bathroom Monologues. Whenever I got up
from studying to use the bathroom, I’d improvise a monologue or story about
anything other than what I was working on for class. If I was studying Kafka’s nightmarish
prisons, then I could spin yarns about orcish politics, or immigration reform,
or the expiration date on the world. It’s seemed to work out.
9. I was surprised in exactly the way you won’t be to find
that my early dramas all got rejected, while even pro-rate publications loved
nonsense humor. Most of my early sales, and my first pro-rate one, are
preposterous. Actually, even the query letter for my first pro-rate sale was a deliberate parody of query letters.
10. I spent about ten years building the worlds my recent
novels are written in. Before I actually started writing the novels, they felt
like a colossal waste of time. Now, they feel relievingly reliable.
As for my picks, I hereby bestow The Kreativ Blogger Award
upon:
