Noveling Career

I started my novelist "career" shortly before my 32nd birthday. When I peer around at different websites, it seems awfully early in life, though with my impatient Gemini personality it feels like a lifetime.

Did I always know I wanted to write? I knew that I always wanted to live in a fantasy land.

I'm the type of person who could take a line from someone's random conversation in the background and develop a whole story around it. Characters, motivations, an eruption of arguments turned to fisticuffs turned to crying and sobbing apologies. This was my life (still is, to a degree), and from time to time I wanted to start writing things longer than short stories.

When I hit college, I fell in love with movies. I watched everything. Most of this was sparked with my love of American Beauty and Fight Club. Yes, yes, I know, typical male stuff. But it sparked an imagination in me that challenged the way I thought about the world. I realized that the audience didn't have to know everything, just enough to keep them guessing and coming back for more.

After three or so shitty screenplays, I stopped writing them. They were emotional outlets of my existential angst brought upon by the mindstate of my early 20s, a multicultural liberal arts degree, and my budding homosexuality. When that erupted and focused itself, I wrote my first novel.

That piece of garbage shall never be spoken of again, and never will I actually tell you what the name of it was...or who it's published under. I will say it was a learning experience and a painful reminder that I tend to not take my time during my bouts with ADHD. These happen more frequently than I'd prefer, BTW.

So, I wrote. And I wrote again for NaNoWriMo. My students wrote with me, and it was a blast. Then, I started another novel that would never come to fruition. I wrote nearly 200 pages of it and just...stopped. Ideas stopped, it seemed to be going too fast, and I had no idea how to revise something that large, so I let it flounder in a binder somewhere.

I then began another novel based on an idea my friend and I kicked around. Chris was known for having outrageous ideas that he deemed ridiculous, but I was always able to breathe life into them. For kicks, we wrote a few pages of a screenplay about a man who was his own roommate. Sounds too far out at first, but the first few pages turned it into something more realistic than he anticipated. That, too, fell short.

Then, I wrote more novels. I finished two more until kicking around an idea for about two years. I originally started it as a 15 page screenplay. It was fun, with images and ideas that were too fresh in my head to let go. I remember the instant I wrote them down and I swear to you, I was so excited to show it and describe it to EVERYONE. Then time passed and a novel never came out of it. Well, until recently.

I was stuck writing and rewriting for such a long time that I stopped actually making new stuff. That is, until last year when I got so pissed off about not being successful with my first novel that I wrote a new story loosely based on the same premise. And wouldn't you know it, GIFTED was born. This story is still in the editing stage with a very detailed, eagle-eye friend of mine, and I hope to have it finished sometime this year. He's a slow reader and life seems to have given us both the tip of its boot in our asses, so we're moving a little slowly lately.

At least I was able to write 2 novels this last month. The first one, Savior, is out now via Kindle, and was the original story I kicked around for about 2 years ago. A much spirited reading of Robert Heinlein's Rules on Dean Wesley Smith's blog tempted me to just sit down and write the damn thing. I discovered that my "pantser" books are really short, only about 60k words long. When I plan, I easily hit the 80k mark.

The second just entered the hands of my beta readers, and is a ridiculous story about a fast-food dominatrix. I was going to name it with a certain prefix of a famous fast food restaurant, but I was too afraid I'd be slapped by a lawsuit. Good for selling copies, I'm sure, but bad for the pocket book. *Sigh* That would have been an excellent marketing plan, really.

I'll let you know when it comes out.

Until then, if you'd love to read any of these stories, or review them, please let me know. Free copies can be made available to those interested in reviewing them on book blogs. Just let me know what your blogs are (links are helpful, so I can follow you, too) and let me know if you want an e version or paper version. E-version are preferable (costs and all), but paper can be made if necessary. :)

Here are the books: Savior , Mr. White , and my fantasy short story (to be linked into the world of my first fantasy trilogy, hopefully out later this year) Just a Taste.

As always, thanks for reading.