A History of Writing

A long time ago, back when I was in grade school, I wrote a story. It was an assignment, probably in Mrs. Sims’s second or third grade class (I had her as a teacher for both years, and the memory is a little foggy on the exact date when the story was written). Regardless, we're talking 1982 or 1983.

Bar and His Car was a simple tale, about a man named Bar, and his automobile. It was a short tome, probably no more than 5 pages, complete with some pencil drawings by yours truly, to illustrate the title character and his mode of transport. The story ended up getting bound for some reason — it was in a deep blue cloth with white circles to break-up the monotony — and ended up in one of the revolving bookcases at our elementary school library. It was, for a time, a source of pride. On every occasion when our class would visit the library, I’d touch the book, caressing its soft cloth cover and think, ‘I wrote this.’

A follow-up to Bar and His Car was How Far Is It to London? which was about a guy on his way to London, by foot (the starting point was always a bit vague), and he would periodically stop people he met along the way and ask them how much longer it would take to reach his destination. There was no proper binding of this (also very short) story, though I think it did spend some time in the back of our classroom, where all good assignments go to die.

Following the bolstering of my literary ego by having a bestseller in the Westview library, I branched out to writing my first narrative written purely for pleasure. And I remember the year - 1984. I started officiously putting copyright dates on my writing beginning at that point. It was, of course, fairly unimaginative. Well, I was only eight-years-old at the time.

Shocker was shamelessly inspired by the Doctor Who story, The Talons of Weng-Chiang. That particular installment of the venerable British sci-fi series featured a ventriloquist and his killer dummy, who were in-service to the god Weng-Chiang. In my book, people were getting murdered in the vicinity of a performance hall, and it was unclear whether the culprit was the ventriloquist performer… or his dummy. It’s a tale that’s been done to death many times, but, hey, at least it got me writing.

Throughout the rest of the 1980s, I wrote three original Doctor Who stories, as well as a novelization of one of my comic book creations — Foxbolt. The ‘90s saw my first detective, Alexander Robertson,  in three short stories. There were also a couple of coming-of-age tales, representing the behind-the-scenes coming-to-terms with my own sexuality.

Finally, for a year-and-a-half during the late-nineties, I spent almost all of my free time in solitude, working on what would become my first (and, to date, only) novel. Methods of Sin was, perhaps more than anything else I’ve written, a cathartic experience. Writing it, I exercised all sorts of demons that had been plaguing me over the years, from dealing with a complicated socialization based around gay nightlife, to a six-year-long crush I’d had on a friend.

All of this is to say that writing — or the passion, enjoyment and love of writing — has been with me for a very long time. It is, not unlike the experience of working on my lone novel -- a form of catharsis. And it is a way to communicate. Sometimes, I write so that I may convey thoughts and emotions that would otherwise linger, dwell, and die on the vine of my own mind.

This blog, begun some ten-and-a-half years ago, is yet another step in the evolution of something I like to do. Thank you for bothering to read along with some of these writings. Setting down one’s thoughts can sometimes be a lonely endeavor. It’s nice to have company.