Over the course of the last fifty years, I’ve averaged reading 60 – 65 books a year verifiable by the fact that I have the bulk of them in my library of over 2000 books. Science Fiction, fantasy, and horror are the main contributors to the wealth of styles and knowledge I’ve amassed from their reading with mainstream fiction adding to a lesser degree.
I enjoy taking a thought and breaking it down further to create something else letting us see other aspects of it linking seemingly unlike things through free association, jumping from one to the next gauging what works and what doesn’t, looking for patterns or sequences seen as clever or leading to something unexpected, a sour note heard when the mesh isn’t right, and a spark seen when it is. I'm weaving in and out of ideas like going through the underwear drawer and losing the ones that didn’t stand up to inspection. (Needs a little work.)
Everything has been said before somewhere; the 100 monkeys in a room full of typewriters. I try to say it in a way giving it a flavor of my own using the above-mentioned method. (For some reason, food-related analogies often come up in my explanations). Grammarly, a spelling and grammar check program, shows me consistently using a broader spectrum of vocabulary than 99% of their users. It’s a form of experimental free association I utilize in several aspects of my writing.
Every story has a voice, at least in my mind. In a blog on the suspension of reality, I visited the voice I hear when reading or telling a story, a tone I tune into when reading, a tone I shoot for when writing, something that I find leads my story’s telling in the direction of my intent. Humor, fear, wonder, hate, conflict, all the emotions and feelings are addressed, their powers varying dependent on the genre in which they are used.
Things have changed since I submitted my first novel and accumulated a stack of rejection letters from literary agents back in 1990, an era when if you didn’t have an agent to represent your book, a publisher wouldn’t sully his eyes looking at it, the slush pile a mass grave site where manuscripts went to die in the company of many others for the lack of an agent.
Unbeknownst to me, somewhere along the way, Kindle came into being. I was aware of downloading eBooks to read but didn’t realize just anyone could publish. A blessing and a curse combination at least giving you a chance to present yourself to the world or your Aunt Petunia (the only person to buy your book and my standard name for an imaginary aunt as Fido is for a dog and Poopsie for a female type whose name I can never remember, politically correct being a form of censorship I steer clear of.).
The following is my story in a jumbled time frame meant to give some idea as to my writings’ origins, a playful interpretation meant as a loose representation of my journey as an author (that is the first time I’ve addressed myself as an author and I actually felt a little tingle) with specifics tied to reality.
Something has come to fruition in the last few years and activated a writing bug along the line of a bee in your bonnet but of a motivational nature as opposed to upset (Ants in your pants seemed childish and a bug up your bum course). Writing has become all I want to do pushing day-to-day chores aside.
My creative juices have marinated long enough to render my imagination a constant supply of storytelling material (Something I see but remains to be seen by way of readers) pulling things subliminally from the 2000+ novels I’ve read utilizing things that flowed in a story and kept it moving, the turning of a phrase I found to my liking, or avoiding a love scene that shifted to mushy and lost me, recognizing what worked and what didn’t.
The wording is something my OCD latches onto finding a way to say something bringing multiple meanings to it, wordplay changing the meaning or adding different levels and creating a more esoteric brand of storytelling. The Burma Shave Solution or What Would Darwin Do, is a tale in which a gorilla is blessed/cursed with an evolutionary wonder but incapable of communicating his difference, an intelligence hidden by way of vocal cords not designed for the intricacies of human speech, gestures making complete sense in the jungle making no sense in civilization, a set of Burma Shave signs allowing a way to express his intelligence.
