Writing Beyond Books

I have aspirations, man. Lots of them.

I write.

It’s not just what I do. At this point, it’s so integrated into my life that it’s become part of who I am. Guy-Who-Writes is the core of my identity. Not only is it what I do for a living, but to be honest a lot of the time it’s all I want to do. I don’t really mind the rest of what goes into the publication process… revisions and cover design and layout and whatever… but I’d rather be writing. And I’d rather be doing the other publishing stuff than going shopping or watching television or eating or sleeping.

Funny how your dream job can turn you into a workaholic.

I write books.

For the last year-and-a-half or so I’ve been writing prose. Steampunk mystery and thriller novelettes and novellas, for the most part, though I recently produced a collection of five psychological apocalyptic stories modeled after the stages of grief. I’m going to be writing a lot more books of all sorts. It’s how I earn my living. Not a great living, but people seem to like my work well enough that I don’t need to scrounge for temp jobs or do freelance copywriting these days.

I wrote a web series.

No, you haven’t seen it. Very few outside the cast and crew have seen the pilot.

It’s a surreal atmospheric horror found-footage project similar in ways to Marble Hornets or Louise is Missing, though perhaps closer to the latter and not as overtly supernatural. It’s cool and creepy and funny and the actors are absolutely fabulous. It’s also currently in development limbo, as our production company had to pull out, citing financial difficulties. We’ve got two seasons scripted. I’m shopping it around.

I’d like to do more screenwriting, either for indie film and web-series or television. I particularly enjoyed the casting process.

I drew comics.

I used to draw as much as I write, back in the day. In high-school I’d fill notebooks up with comics drawn to amuse myself and my friends, bizarre absurdist scrawlings drawing from the people we knew, pop culture, and the comic books I studied to learn how to do what they were doing.

I don’t draw any more. I wasn’t really any good at it. I’d still like to take part in the production of comics as a writer, either on a small project or on a freelance basis for a company.

I make games.

Another hobby that I don’t have any time for anymore is game development. Coding appealed to the structuralist in me, solving problems, coming up with systems that emulate what you need them to.I even finished a few text adventure games that are, perhaps mercifully, lost to the the annals of time.

What held me back was, again, being a one-man show with abysmal graphic design skills. I absolutely would not mind working in game development as a writer or level designer, though.

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