Words on a page
I wrote my first short story, well the first one that wan’t a class assignment, on a typewriter that sat in the kitchen in the house of memories that is now a memory. I think I was nine or ten, but in my childhood recollections I tend to think I was always nine or ten. I am sure I had typos then. I definitely have them now. I have no editor and since the car wreck I have other issues as well. My left hand sometimes types faster than my right and my brain compartmentalizes issues and locks them away to keep my stress level down. It does this on its own and proofreading seems to be one of this things it finds stressful. Then end result is my brain says this is read to post. Often it is not.
I have never kept a daily journal. It was never my thing. ink to paper has a permanence and writing the first word, ruining the pristine beauty of the unspoiled page, has often been too much for me. There were times when I was arrogant to write something. Here are the pages I ruined. These are scans from journals I found in a box from twenty or thirty years ago.
Words expanded from journals to short stories, essays, oddities and those found their way into a collection of sorts called Foes of Reality. The title comes from a Joseph Conrad quote.
I wrote my first feature length script in 1989. Nothing came of it. I sold my first script in 1993. It was produced on 35 mm by some people who are probably still suing each other over the writes to it. After that, well, I cooled my heels writing corporate things for corporate people. Then my soul died. I wrote a couple of screenplays and a whole lot of short scripts. Some were for me and others were for my students to have something to do. I’ve got the first 30 pages of those screenplays here.