"I'm also quite intrigued by your manner
regarding your book, how it came about and who you are as a writer. Any thoughts?"
Space Orville was born on March 29, 1982. It was a cold, damp evening and I was
struggling to come up with something for my high school creative writing
class. I had hammered out a few rather
smarmy, deliberately oblique poems that were going nowhere and sat staring at
the page waiting for something to jump out of it. For no reason that I can recall, I typed the
words "Space Orville" under what I had written. Half an hour later, I had close to three
pages of this bizarre, rambling space adventure that actually showed
promise. My classmates found it
thoroughly amusing in a twisted, "Dr. Caligari meets Flash Gordon"
kind of way. My instructor was perplexed
but expressed support for the ideas nonetheless.
Throughout the next year, I added to the story
periodically, sharing the chapters for laughs as they came about, but never
worked on it with any degree of seriousness.
I kept all of my original work but, not long after high school, it found
its way into a file folder and there it stayed for the next 18 years. The concept, though, stayed alive somewhere
in the back of my head the entire time.
Then came an adult creative writing course I took through
The Institute for Children's Literature.
As a final project, I dug out my old manuscript, dusted it off and
decided there might be enough to work with.
And so began the long, slow process of building something that was
actually coherent and readable out of the rambling train wreck that was the
original story. With three chapters
completed and reviewed by my instructor, I graduated the writing course with
the promise to finish the manuscript and get the darn thing published.
That instructor has, sadly, passed away, but I think she
would be pleased with the results. Completing the manuscript fulfilled a
promise not only to her, but to myself.
I discovered that I actually had not only a writing style, but a method
as well. I like to write longhand on the
first pass. I sometimes start from an
outline but find, more frequently, that a series of randomly generated ideas on
a page will often take shape on their own as long as my pen keeps moving across
the paper. My first edit comes when I
type the thing out. Next edit comes when
I read over what I typed, realize it was all tripe and have to go back and
start over. None of this should come as news to any author, though. Seems we never quite finish editing our work,
even after it's been available to the reading public for nearly a year. Comes a time, however, when you've finally
got to just leave it alone and let folks read it. Most of them will tell you honestly whether
or not it's any good.
I find I write to entertain not only others, but myself as
well. I like refreshing ideas, optimism
and happy endings. I like wordplay, quirky humor and weird characters. I've read and enjoyed plenty of dark,
dystopian speculative fiction, hard-edged supernatural nail-biters and deep,
psychological thrillers and there are many very talented authors out there,
indies especially, who can write this stuff very effectively. When I sit down
to write, this different brand of crazy jumps out of my head that I have
embraced as my own style. Does any of
that come close to saying who I am as a writer?
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