The Journey Begins!

The creation of this website and blog represents my first truly public step toward authorship, though the broader story is longer.  

The building of my personal timeline, from that first spark of interest to the present, is so fraught with false-starts and missteps that I’m surprised I’ve not collapsed in on myself like an undercooked souffle of failed artistic ambition.

I remember the writing project in second grade that hooked me on creative composition.  I remember writing what I thought was a book in sixth grade that, printed, came out to about thirty pages.  I remember continuing to write ‘books’ throughout high school, although, by the time I found myself bewilderingly enrolled in university, I was equally focused on short stories and plays.  My freshman year, I started an epic fantasy serial that I released to my friends through e-mail called The Claws of the Beast; compiled, it added up to about a hundred and sixty pages before dying the midpoint-death that was, frankly, to become my literary satan (Hebrew usage, not Arabic) and most prominent personal failing in creative writing.  

I gave up writing for a while.  Took it up again.  Gave it up again.  Wrote stories a friend of mine (correctly) pointed out were too D&D derivative, which grossed me out, causing me to give it up again.

Responding to the compulsion, again, I later began to create my own world: an obliquely familiar version of our own where the legacy of Atlantis and the Roman Empire (and magic!) has had a profound global impact.  I wrote another half-novel based in this world, which, again, died a midpoint death.  I know now the mistakes I made— running too many protags, not having a plan in place for the midpoint, trying to set up too much of the future in a single book—- but at the time, failure seemed to sprout from my efforts, rather than be an identifiable consequence of my own decisions.  I couldn’t finish a novel.  Why?  Who knows?  I would just… get to the middle, and couldn’t move forward.

… and then, about seven years later, I stumbled across Brandon Sanderson’s BYU lectures (2020, they’re on Youtube, look them up, I command it).  Within two lectures, he had laid a very precise finger against the wound of my failed novels and told me exactly what was wrong with my process, and how to fix it.

Now, I’m a writing teacher.  Sure, English teacher, really, this is high school, but teaching writing is kind of my strong suit.  To have someone break into my process and so completely explode a problem I’d wrestled for a decade and a half was both humbling and thrilling; it mean that authorship might still be a real possibility.  I set out to write my first complete fantasy novel: The Last Song of the Leviathan.  A month and a half later, I had a first draft of 126,000 words.  First edit pared it down to 106,000.

Now, as I query agents and hope, I’m writing a second novel.  It’s not a sequel to the first, but it is set in that same world.  (I’m still trying to think up a good public name for the world; haven’t got one yet.  Suggestions?)  That second novel, The Immortal Cobbler of New Palermo is going well.  Gotta tell ya, I’m super into it.  I love writing about an older protagonist who’s trying to do something as relatable as save his marriage and a neighbor kid from an abused family.  He’s also supposed to be filling an exclusive contract to a dangerous man: the making a masterwork pair of shoes the man the streets call Don La Morte will wear to his daughter’s wedding.

I figured, maybe it was time to reach out to you, too.  I want readers, people who are hungry, or at least curious, about the offerings I tease on this site.  I also want to help you— yes, you, specifically— to feel like maybe you could do it, too.  I mean, I turned forty last year.  It took that long.  Maybe I can help you get a better start than I got?  It’s what I want for all my students.  You could be one, too.

I invite you to be one, too.

If I get my way, my shoveling coal into this new and frightening boiler will steam my writing career toward the success of which I’ve dreamed since second grade.  I’m hoping you’re willing to hop on that proverbial train with me, or at the very least wave a fashionable kerchief from the railing platform.

If I fail to mask my desperation, reader, then know that my game is this: I happen to know that I can’t really do this without you.