Who Am I?

MeThat's a very good question. The answer requires a bit of soul searching and alot of editing. In the past, I'd be tempted to just let everything bleed out through my pen, but this isn't a confessional. So, I'll keep it short and save the long meandering fits of introspection for my memoirs.

I've always been a daydreamer. As a child, my imagination was my best friend. It was all I needed and I thought that everyone had one just as strong as mine. While all children have them, they tend to outgrow them. Their imaginations get tossed into the corner toy box of the brain and forgotten. Some are fortunate enough to be repurposed for constructive uses, like designing rocket ships or artistic skyscrapers, but for a smaller portion of us, they neither disappear nor change into a pragmatic tool.

It took me a very long time to realize this.

I tried to channel my imagination into something that society would find useful. At first, what I learned in school was just raw material for my mind to daydream in new directions. Since I daydreamed about space travel, I thought that when I went to college I could major in aerospace engineering.

That didn't work.

I switched to chemical engineering. Chemistry was something that always fascinated me. I also believed that the only way to clean up the dirty chemical industry was to reform it from within. Although my aspirations were noble, my head was in the clouds. The recession of '91 put a kibosh on these dreams and sent me down a path of dead end lab tech jobs.

While my chemical engineering career was going nowhere, I read about AOL and the Internet in 1994. I was hooked. A couple of years later as demand for computer programmers surged, I taught myself HTML and hopped on the dotcom bandwagon.

It was a good ride for a while. It got me out of debt and into prosperity. I married and bought a house, two sure signs of stability. I thought that writing code was going to be my path until I burned out. I couldn't hack working for companies that lied to their employees and their "chew 'em up and spit 'em out" mentality. I went into business for myself but, after a few years of little success, my heart just wasn't in it anymore.

It was time for something new.

Since daydreaming was something that came naturally, I thought that maybe I could make a career out of it. Why not put my imagination to work telling stories? Become a writer!

I confess that becoming a writer was something I thought about in college. I rejected it because I didn't believe it was a practical career. I thought that it would take too long to generate any reasonable amount of success that one could support a family on. But what I didn't understand then was that "practicality" is besides the point. You don't become a writer because you want to. You write because you have to.

The signs have been there all along and I just failed to notice them.

Many a night I laid awake because my brain just wouldn't shut down. It ran through "what if" scenarios over and over until it was satisfied with the outcome. Whole conversations would be laid out word by word. Each point and counterpoint in an argument thoroughly debated. And while dreams offered me story ideas, the waking world was, and is, sufficient.

All I need to do is just listen and the words come. Unfortunately, it's not some linear, well categorized, discretely punctuated dictation. It's a maelstrom of symphonies that I have to sort out. But the writing process itself is more like sculpture. The sculptor has to see the final statue entombed within the massive block of marble before he takes the chisel to the rock.

But besides vision, the sculptor has to have the skills to tease the final masterpiece from the slab. I've been working on this over the years. Besides the occasional bit of prose, my main outlet has been sci-fi rpg's. The campaigns that I've run have kept the players wanting more. More recently, I've worked harder at taking the ideas out of my brain and communicating them into stories. In the writer's workshops that I've taken, my work has received sufficient praise that I've been encouraged to continue. Even non-sci-fi fans have been sucked in.

Now that I've finished my first novel, I've proven that I can make the committment to see a story through from inception to conclusion. All I have to do is find an audience willing to listen to my daydreams.

\_/
DED
1/25/06


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