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| Greetings. I'm moderan. |
Well, by way of maybe answering-I write horror and science fiction and sometimes unholy combinations of the two. Quite a few of my things have been commercially published. Some of them even have my name on them.
I've been writing short stories since I was seven or eight years old. Before that, I had done a couple of comics. I was an early Marvel zombie, and had a bad fan-reaction to an issue of Daredevil that had the Stilt-Man as a villain.
Dr. Strange got me onto Lovecraft. The Fantastic Four got me into science fiction. I still love the cosmic stuff best.
In school, I wrote a lot. I performed monster stories, copping the idea from Ellison. I write songs and hummed them on the way to school. I took electronic organ and accordion lessons. Neither instrument really took, though I can still play either one if I have to. School wasn't for me. I was bored and disruptive and spent most of my time in the hall with my nose shoved into a book or in the library searching out new books. And scribbling in my notebook.
Anthologies with Lovecraft in them led me down strange paths in the dark. I painted eyes on fences, wore saffron robes, endured the attentions of Enoch. Dangerous Visions and Again, to which I was directed to by the Avengers, set me on a course for known and unknown space, where I met Gully Foyle and Paul Atreides and Valentine Michael Smith.
I wrote. I read. In sixth grade, I took a speed-reading course. Aces. I can read a novel in the time it takes most people to watch the movie. School became completely unnecessary in my eyes. Once I had read the textbook, I knew where the lessons were going. The rest was just waiting.
I suck at waiting.
The guitar finally captured my attention at twelve or so. It took a couple more years before I was to have my own, but I always had access to one by then. I liked to play the bass (still do).
It was to be many years before I was any good at six-string. I kept at it, though. My first good guitar was an Epiphone Coronet, red with a white pick guard, and a matching amp. That gear would be worth a couple of K right now. I kept the amp for a long time. I had to give the guitar to an acquaintance because I broke his, falling over it while trying to get my drunken ass into the bed in the dark.
Got hold of a fantastic bass from a friend's brother, a Guild M-85.
That bass was my friend for many years. I preferred it to both of the Rickenbackers and all three of the Fenders I've had over the years.
Mostly, I just screwed around. I recorded some rudimentary stuff at times, and there were times when I wanted to do more, but it just didn't work out that way for a long while.
At some point, I found myself a member of a cover band, doing the bass pulses of popular hard-rock hits and slipping in the occasional original. That band was together for a very long time, playing on weekends and practicing on Tuesdays. We were tight enough to have Zappa-like style-change hand signals and to have developed a series of comedy routines and tv show cover versions to keep the audience engaged while someone was tuning up, or throwing up, or something.
To shorten that story, I learned how to play the damn thing, and made serious inroads into keyboards, drums, and best of all, production. I had gotten to do the dial-twiddling.
Just as that was getting good, and starting to pay off rather handsomely, it all ended, and in tears. Other areas of my life changed as well. I stopped being a programmer and went back into the transporation business. I wrote a couple of novels in there.
I started driving cars for a living. Limos, cabs. Cabs are better cuz you don't have to wear a monkeysuit. The hours are shorter too.
When I couldn't drive any more, or needed a change, I did other stuff. I managed a telemarketing office, sold and installed windows, cooked in a great variety of restaurants, washed cars. I got by, but didn't do a great deal creatively until I got the internet.
That restored my interest in writing. I did an interactive novel (it's since been lost). Multiple endings, with characters you could write emails to and get incorporated into the story. A couple more novels followed, made in the classic sense, by lashing several related short stories together.
About nine or ten years ago, I wrote a bunch of Cthulhu Mythos stories and edited/webmastered an ezine called Letters from Outside.
After that, I spent some years making music, mostly. I wrote some rpg stuff at panhistoria, heading up a few novels there until I blew town when the site went down for a while. RPG wasn't as fun as I would have liked it to be. I did come up with some good recurring characters for my cast, though.
The music is archived at AcidPlanet.
I've thrice successfully completed NaNoWriMo. Two of those novels are possibly salvageable and parts of them may well appear in this space. I'm planning to do it again this year.
I play guitar and compose (and record the results). You can hear some of that at ReverbNation (or in the sidebar). I'll be adding more soon. My music is mostly hard rock with progressive tendencies and a generous infusion of electronic space-rock. Some jazz too. The stuff is almost all instrumental at this point.
I'm just starting work on a webcomic, based on a novella I wrote ten years ago.It'll probably have a soundtrack.
Earlier this year, I went through a near-fatal bout with pneumonia and complications. I'm recuperating, and can't work a real job for a bit. I'll need to entertain myself. I may as well entertain you as well.
My better half has a blog here at Blogger-Knitting Kitties. She has a lot of information there about when and why I was sick, in among the knitting stuff and pictures of cute pets. We have a lot of animals.
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