I thought I'd take a minute to give a little background about myself... I always like to know a little about the folks whose work I'm reading. It seems to give a kind of grounding to the story if you know that the person who wrote it lives in the mountains, or is one of twelve children, etc.
So here's my info, and forgive me if I'm a little cryptic. I still don't entirely trust this Internet thingy when it comes to privacy. I'm a white male, inching up on forty, have been happily married to Amy, my high school sweetheart for 16 years and have an equally sweet daughter Lily who will be 2 years old by the time I finish this post (at least it seems to go that fast).
We live in a townhouse in a lovely wooded co-op on the edge of a large college town in the Midwest. It's the town where my family moved when I was in the eighth grade, and I've lived here ever since. My parents are still here in town -- my mother works for the same company that she joined in 1985, and my in-laws (who I get along very well with, contrary to myth) live in northern Alabama, a full day's drive away and a great place to vacation at least once a year.
I work for the website of a major book retailer but actually know very little about the technical side of it all... I suppose there are a lot of us out there now. I know how to do the things I need to get done, but don't have to deal with the icky cyberguts of tables and UNIX and all that.
And I guess that's mostly what you need to know. You'll find out the rest on a need-to-know basis, but I'm guessing that if you're reading this, you already know most of this stuff.
Okay, I'll get to the real stuff here soon, I promise.
Monday, April 26, 2010
The Beginning
"Don't you know, about a zillion years ago/Some star sneezed, now they're paging you in reception... Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light?" -- Andy Partridge
"We are starstuff." -- Carl Sagan
So here I am, blogging like I belong here! If you had gone back to my twelve-year-old self, tapping away on my old manual typewriter (which I still have, by the way), and told him that one day in the future, not too long before he reached the age of forty, people would have typewriters that were all connected and anyone could read what anyone else was writing at any time, he would have been well and truly freaked out. And telling him that he would be joining that massive writing team would probably have thrilled him just as much.
So here's what I plan to do here... I'm a writer. This is something that it's taken me a long time to realize, and I've cycled through about a half-dozen professions that I was dead certain I was going to be over the course of my life, and the only thing they had in common was that they eventually all led me back to writing. About two years ago, I started a website not-so-coincidentally named werealllight.com and posted every finished (and some unfinished) things I had written. It was a lot of learning about HTML (the super-secret and also nearly-obsolete languge of web pages) and a lot of work to get things to appear on the page the way I wanted them to.
But as far as websites go, it was far from glamourous. It was all text, nothing that couldn't be reproduced just as well in a blog. So I let the domain expire this year and decided to start this blog instead. So I aim to post things that I write... old stories (of which there are somewhere around two dozen), novels (all one and a half of them), screenplays (two and a half), plus various essays and reviews.
I basically want a place to post all these stories I have lurking in my hard drive, and also create an impetus for doing more. For, as you might be able to tell already, my writing muscles aren't the sharpest in the world yet. As any writer will tell you, 95% of writing consists of thinking about writing. Which is probably for the best -- if you're spending only 5% of your time thinking about it, I can assure you that it's not going to be any good. But those muscles need a good regular stretching, and I hope that the awareness of a place where my work is living and participating in the digital world will get me sitting at the keyboard more often than I have been lately.
"We are starstuff." -- Carl Sagan
So here I am, blogging like I belong here! If you had gone back to my twelve-year-old self, tapping away on my old manual typewriter (which I still have, by the way), and told him that one day in the future, not too long before he reached the age of forty, people would have typewriters that were all connected and anyone could read what anyone else was writing at any time, he would have been well and truly freaked out. And telling him that he would be joining that massive writing team would probably have thrilled him just as much.
So here's what I plan to do here... I'm a writer. This is something that it's taken me a long time to realize, and I've cycled through about a half-dozen professions that I was dead certain I was going to be over the course of my life, and the only thing they had in common was that they eventually all led me back to writing. About two years ago, I started a website not-so-coincidentally named werealllight.com and posted every finished (and some unfinished) things I had written. It was a lot of learning about HTML (the super-secret and also nearly-obsolete languge of web pages) and a lot of work to get things to appear on the page the way I wanted them to.
But as far as websites go, it was far from glamourous. It was all text, nothing that couldn't be reproduced just as well in a blog. So I let the domain expire this year and decided to start this blog instead. So I aim to post things that I write... old stories (of which there are somewhere around two dozen), novels (all one and a half of them), screenplays (two and a half), plus various essays and reviews.
I basically want a place to post all these stories I have lurking in my hard drive, and also create an impetus for doing more. For, as you might be able to tell already, my writing muscles aren't the sharpest in the world yet. As any writer will tell you, 95% of writing consists of thinking about writing. Which is probably for the best -- if you're spending only 5% of your time thinking about it, I can assure you that it's not going to be any good. But those muscles need a good regular stretching, and I hope that the awareness of a place where my work is living and participating in the digital world will get me sitting at the keyboard more often than I have been lately.
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