A WRITER’S JOURNEY, PART 3
You realize you are living a dead end life. You are not going anywhere, except back to the beginning of a circle where you start over, go to the end, and start over again. Your mind is clouded by routine and boredom. You occasionally put pen to paper and scribble a few words creating a poem and it briefly reminds you of your humanity.
Some things you do out of love. Some things you do based on delusion or illusion. Somethings you do for all the above.
So, when you meet a dynamic woman, several thoughts cross your mind. The state of being in love. Being a protector. Escape. If trying to recapture memories of writing prompts in first grade is difficult, clearly identifying emotional response from thirty-five years ago is not any easier. I remember only what suits me to exist emotionally today.
All told, from meeting to dissolving the marriage was eighteen months. There was no writing in that time period, except from a Miami Vice episode written on spec in the hopes that someone who knew someone MIGHT be able to get it into the right hands. What that time did for me was to create an emotional state conducive to a vast literary output. An eventual literary output. Perhaps a dozen pieces from that time period are worth discussing. Mostly maudlin, woe-is-me. Heavy use of sonnets. Dark, depressing, not quite suicidal, but utterly hopeless in nature. Still, however, lacking any originality and the only craft a reliance on established forms.
There was a brief period where I lived with my parents. It was during that time I attempted my first novel intended as an entry in the Turner Tomorrow Awards. It was another dystopian (there I go again!) tale based on the Rip Van Winkle story (again being derivative!). At least, I can pinpoint the start of my fiction phase. Along with that was a complex, almost experimental novel inspired in part by the killings of the Gainesville Ripper. And therein was my first interest in crime fiction.
From August 1988 to early 1990, I moved from Florida to Connecticut to Northern California to Southern California to Florida and finally to Massachusetts. While in California, there was a collaboration on a screenplay regarding the Katyn Massacre during World War II, submissions of screenplays that were easily rejected, and more poems, some venturing out into free verse. I was almost like Odysseus after the Trojan War, just not nearly so heroic.
This was a phase of writing while slipping further away from a solid life or lifestyle, giving up a job and apartment in Connecticut because I didn’t have a car, living with a college friend in California who had a fantastical view of life, being forced to live with my parents, gaining a stake and moving back to Massachusetts. I finally rejected the paradise-that-wasn’t of Florida and the dream of Hollywood.
It was one purchase of a bit of archaic technology that started my serious ventures in writing.
NEXT: Going home
