I think the column title says it all.

I wanted to just leave it at that for the first column and let people make up their own minds. Someone intelligently talked me out of it. The thing is, they said, if you want to have people come back and read other columns that are probably not the best way to go about convincing them.

I have to say, that's a fair point.

So what I really want to do is take these precious few inches I'm allotted and talk a little about myself, let you fine folks out there know what to expect in the future, lay my biases on the table so we all understand what we're getting into and in the process maybe crack some jokes that people will actually laugh at.

But if I don't succeed with all of those today I won't feel too bad.

First off, background. Let's get that out of the way. Currently (as of this writing, though I tremble at the thought of archeologists reading this a thousand years from now) I'm twenty-four years old, fresh out of college and working as a pharmacist, living on the East Coast in that fine state called Jersey. What does any of that have to do with writing? Absolutely nothing. But all the drug jokes will suddenly make more sense.

Ahem. But to be relevant, I started writing on a regular basis probably when I was in the eight grades. I'm not sure what actually got me started, though it was most likely a case of extreme arrogance, of reading my favorite writers and going "Hey I can do that too!" Most people I think in high school go through that sort of phase, putting together a story in their head that they think will be absolutely fantastic. I was unlike most of those people in that I tried to put it down on paper. But don't think I was some kind of prodigy, my early stories to put it politely, stunk. Big time. The quality might have been a little better than the usual high school writers but we're not talking about Nobel Prize winning stuff by a long shot. Perhaps if I get stuck for a column or it's a slow week at some point I'll reprint some of the real old stuff and we can all make fun of it together.

The weird thing with me is that I was ambitious. People who were writers in my high school could in general be divided into two camps. You had the poets on one hand, churning out stanza after stanza of poems with one word titles like "Lust" and "Pain" and "Crankshaft" (I made that last one up, I think). Then you had the writers, who mostly wrote quick little stories that were thinly veiled satires of things going on at the school, generally starring their friends (with names changed, but not enough so you didn't know who they were). Then there was me, quirky little me.
My first influence was science fiction and I had spent a lot of my childhood devouring a steady diet of Asimov and the like, as well as televisions shows like Doctor Who and the old "Buck Rogers" and "Flash Gordon" serials. I had begun to craft my own alien races and situations, purely for kicks. So when I wrote those first stories, that was where I focused my attention. But I'd like to stress again, these were by no means buried classics. Only the first word really applies. But my friends thought they were neat and that gave me enough of an impetus to keep going and write a second, and a third. By the time I had reached sophomore year I had managed to create quite the back catalog, create some continuing characters and some almost original situations. The stories had begun to develop a little more sophistication (in the same manner a chimpanzee learns how to eat with a spoon instead of just stuffing the food in his mouth) with more complicated stories, shifting viewpoints and a greater range of characters. To my young mind, each story was a leap forward in quality.

But then a funny thing happened.

People stopped caring.

The stories were getting longer, you see. Generally they would range to around twenty pages of double spaced Courier-12 font goodness, but gradually that began to tick upward, with a couple even reaching the coveted hundred-page mark. To me, the stories were better than ever and I looked forward to starting each one.
Thing was, nobody was reading them.

Now before you shift back in disgust to whatever you were reading before this, this isn't some lame "I was so alone . . . so alone" type of rant, nor am I whining. Fact was, to my friends, twenty pages of passable written story was an amusing diversion. One hundred pages plus were like asking for a commitment, like going steady or something. I had exactly one friend who was still reading by junior year but the first story I wrote topped out at three hundred pages. When I showed it to him, plopping it on the desk with a kind of sadistic glee, he looked at me, said something unprintable and added, "You don't expect me to read all this, do you?"

From that point on, I was on my own.

I was undone by my own complexity. The back story of this weird Universe I was fashioning was hideously complicated, taking up entire notebooks (to this day I'm the only one who even has one percent of it straight), the situations were becoming more and more bizarre, and my ambition kept tugging at me, making the plots more and more epic. These were still by no means masterpieces but I can probably state with some degree of truth that I was the only person crafting NOVELS in the true sense of the word, and not just quaint little tales to giggle over during lunch.

The problem was that my potential audience and me were drifting apart. Truth was, this was the best thing that could have happened to me. You see, I was desperate to be liked by my friends and others and thus did my best to include elements in my stories that I thought would appeal to high school students. Ultra-violence, absurdist situations, "edge" language, it was all there, at odds with the stories themselves, crammed in without any real regard to whether it actually served the story or not. Most of the time it did not. For a generation raised on R-rated movies and heavy metal music, there was really nothing I could do that would shock them to the point where I would get the coveted "Oh! Cool!" It was a fool's game. They had no interest in the finer points of dialogue and plot, and I had no ability to give them what they wanted. My writing was becoming all surface, completely superficial, crappy jokes and oh so shocking situations strung together with some lip service paid to a plot. It hit its nadir with the aforementioned giant story, basically one long fight scene between my characters and vampires. Something had to give.

So I withdrew my stories from the public eye and labored in obscurity. Without the hungry eye of the teenager upon my stuff, begging for more, I could spend more time focusing my craft, working on plot and characterization. It was a good trade off, because now I was beginning to tell the stories I wanted to tell, stories not so obsessed with the trappings of genre science fiction and instead more interested in character interactions and trying to come up with the most "out there" situations I could conceive.

The problem of course was that I was still no better.

Oh, there were bright spots but overall it was still pretty damn mediocre.

But a couple stories in, something weird happened. Free of all constraints, I started turning out my best work ever. The plots became more and more complicated, the characters more three-dimensional, the situations not as stale or clichéd as earlier. Goofiness still abounded.

Just before my senior year in high school started, I finished the best damn story of my young career. A quasi-crime story, it featured the SF characters in a realistic setting, juggled a ridiculously complicated plot that bounced around like no man's business and for the first time felt like a novel. For the first time I sat back and went "Damn that was good." It was like nothing I had done before. It was like nothing anyone I had ever known had done. When I finished that story, in that moment I felt more like a writer than I ever had.

The only problem with all this?

Everyone had ceased caring a year or two before.

Oh, I had built (through no intentions of my own) a reputation as that "writer guy" as I carted the giant tomes that my stories had become, working before class on editing and the like. I achieved a sort of mythical resonance, appearing every few months with a new brick of a story. People asked me questions like "What's it about?" (To which I found myself increasingly unable to explain, in a strange case of aphasia) and "How long did it take you?" (As long as it needed to) and "Where do you get your ideas?" (You'd be surprised) and the ever popular "Where do you find the time?" (Well, beyond school and work, I had nothing else to do).

People were full of questions.

But no one was reading.

What could I do though? I had never done this to be popular, what had started as a neat way to impress my friends had turned into a near-profession. I was writing completely in a vacuum, these were the days before I had Internet access (which I wouldn't get until after I graduated high school) and so when I say no one was reading, I truly mean nobody.
But what was a boy to do? There were stories to tell, and so I soldiered on, trying to get it all down, racing against deadlines imposed only by myself, churning out tales that I knew nobody would read. It was bizarre, working in that kind of absolute solitude, having no actual reason to keep doing what I was doing, but continuing anyway. And honestly I think that's part of being a writer, that weird, almost obsessive determination. Writing is not the world's most exciting hobby, unless you do it as some kind of performance art. You're sitting in front of a typewriter/computer for hours at a time and sometimes just staring at blank pages, waiting for inspiration to strike. Not exactly a thing that goes over big at parties. And to do it without any sort of recognition, not even a "spiffy job, trooper" from someone reading over your shoulder . . . I can't think of any profession, except perhaps being a monk, that nurtures that kind of isolation. Not that the isolation is a guarantee, especially once you become famous (QED Stephen King) but in the beginning you're basically on your own. And if you don't have that kind of obsessive drive I mentioned earlier, then you'll just give up. Most people do. They can think of far better things they'd rather be doing instead of jerking around with their typewriter/computer and trying to write this stupid story that nobody will ever read. Why even bother?
So that was the situation I found myself rather comfortably in. My senior year of high school was essentially I pumping out novel after novel at what can only be called an insane rate of speed. And as much as I hate admitting it, the tension of producing so much work that nobody would ever read was beginning to get wearying. The last novel was fraught with this kind of tension, questioning why I did what I did and bringing the overall storyline to a final close. By the time I graduated and finished that novel off, I had convinced myself that I was retiring from writing. I told myself I had nothing more to say, that I had done everything to the characters that I could possibly do and there were no more frontiers to explore. I wrapped it all up with a clean conscience and looked forward to moving onto something else entirely.

But you know how long it lasted?

About three months.

See, the thing was, I had discovered "literature" in that time, more specifically Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (still one of my favorite novels of all time) and that broadened my perspective considerably, showing me that you didn't have to be science-fiction to write about odd stuff (or that science-fictional elements were exclusively the province of the genre), that conventions of structure were little better than tradition and that there really was no limit to the way you could tell a story. More "post-modern" typewriters followed, from Joyce to Faulkner to Gaddis to Dos Passos and so on and with each reading I grew more and more excited. I wanted to tell stories like this, I wanted to try and break the rules and give the reader the unexpected, I wanted to experiment with both form and structure, telling an entertaining story that was more than entertainment. Furthermore, I wanted to do it all in a vaguely science-fictional context, treating the situations as realistic as I could, trying to find real life ramifications in the weird stuff that went on. And I didn't mean "Would Tristian be chased by the US Army" but more personal stuff, the effect this stuff had on relationships, both direct and peripheral, the tension it caused, the fear it created.
Suddenly, I had a direction once again.

In August 1997, I kicked it off with a new story and really haven't looked back since. However much I liked those older stories from high school, the pack of novels (about five or so, I've been averaging nearly one a year) have been uniformly decent in my eyes, turning out almost exactly as I planned, showcasing a nice mix of weird ideas and adventure and more emotional moments, as well as a sprinkling of the avant-garde, all within a structured framework so it just didn't come across as so much wanking. It might anyway, but that's not the intent.

The biggest difference this time is that I managed to get something of an audience. Getting AOL and discovering the various message boards there was a nice bonus, at least I got to show off some of my work on the Internet. No one read it still, except for a few people, but it was there at least. I tried to make a presence for myself on the boards as much as possible, generally kicking off each of my chapter posts with a random introduction that rarely had anything to do with the chapter and answering comments as often as possible, taking the smallest thread of a question and expanding it into an essay length explanation. My stuff isn't for everyone, but a lot of people admired what I was trying to do, even if nobody actually wanted to sit there and read the whole stinking chapter.

Some time later I hit on the rather obvious idea that I could get people to read my stuff by commenting on theirs. I have a somewhat obsessive attention to detail that tended to lend itself to commenting, I would take the time and pick the story apart, making notes of all kinds of things, from the prose to the dialogue to the overall direction of the plot. Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I would pick a random thing and go off on a brief tangent and make all sorts of odd jokes, just to lighten the mood. People enjoyed it and appreciated it; I even began to get people actually requesting me to read their stuff and comment.

This, however, led to really no new readers. Oh well. It was worth a try.

I did find that I enjoyed the commenting aspect of things and I managed to get quite good at it at one point. I've been in semi-retirement for the last few years but we're going to try and emerge for a bit and see where it takes us.
So, if you're read down this far, what can you really expect from me? Basically a critique by me will be of the rambling variety, not unlike this column and will be way longer than you're expecting, probably longer than the story itself (it's happened, don't laugh). I tend to make a lot of off the wall comments as well, I'm not so much into the "making fun of people" thing but I'm not above cracking jokes at the characters' expense if I can think of something funny. I try to be as honest as I can, keeping in mind that a) I'm no expert and b) not everyone in the world will write like me (gasp!) and I try to focus on just about everything, down to the wording of sentences. I'm sure we'll have examples up here to show everyone soon enough, but that's pretty much the idea.

So how about those biases? As far as fiction goes I'll read (and have read) pretty much a little bit of everything, science fiction is probably where I have the broadest knowledge. I've read a better than decent sampling of twentieth century literature, mostly of the American and British variety, but I'm currently working on that and seeing if I can expand to the nineteenth century as well. I've read most major fantasy books, even if I'm not the biggest fan of epic fantasy for reasons that will probably become very apparent when someone decides to submit an epic fantasy story. I'm also an avid reader of comic books, from the many superhero types (Batman!) to the really arty stuff. So basically I'm looking to be entertained but the bar is set pretty high since I'm familiar with most of the clichés. The stuff that I really enjoy is the kinds of things that take ideas and spin them off into unforeseen directions, "mad ideas" as some writers call them. I like experimentation, especially when it gives the story greater resonance, plus I have a little more respect for it on some level. But most of all I appreciate effort, I really don't see a need to put someone down simply because I don't feel they're not up to snuff but at the same time I'm not about to give someone a free pass because I'm afraid of hurting their feelings. You want an honest opinion, you get an honest opinion and I can guarantee that I will back up every single opinion I spew out to the best of my ability, I'll never say, "Oh this sucks" without trying to explain why and what I would do to correct it. I hate when people do that and when people thank me for my comments, it's because I don't just toss off random opinions without details.

At the end of the day though, I want to have fun here and I want people to enjoy what goes on over here. More often than not things will be very goofy here. My cardinal rule with any line of commentary is "If you're not going to lose sleep over it, then neither am I." When all is said and done, if the comments you receive don't really move you one way or another, then that's that. I'm not out to mold anyone in my image.

So welcome to the fun then. If we're lucky, we'll all learn something here. Worst case, you get to watch me attempt terrible jokes, which in itself can be entertaining. It really could go either way.

Open the gates then, and off we go.

- MB 10.11.03
"But when the city spreads out just like a cut vein, everybody drowns sad and lonely . . ." - Beulah, "Gene Autry"