The story so far...

Nuclear creeks, 13-page book reports, and one overdue epic fantasy

I think most of my classmates hated book reports. In junior high, I loved them. At the time, I was living on a cul-de-sac in suburban St. Louis. My brother and sister were several years older than me, but our street had a good mix of kids and we all hung out together playing kick ball, or having adventures along a nearby creek. It turns out, that creek is full of world war II era nuclear waste, but that’s a story for a different day.

There was a guy who lived on the cul-de-sac. I don’t actually know what his occupation was, but he had access to a lot of books. Every year, he would have a garage sale and the highlight was the books. He’d set up saw horses in his garage and lay sheets of plywood over them. Then, he’d fill the sheets of plywood with hundreds of brand new, never opened books. It was like an annual neighborhood book fair. He sold paperbacks for $.25 each. Hard cover books were $1.00. As neighbors, we were given first crack at them the night before the garage sale. It was one of my favorite nights of the year.

I went to a catholic school. I was smart and kind of nerdy. My older sister worked as a receptionist at a local dance school and she was popular with the girls in my class so that gave me a little bit of street cred, but my parents were pretty strict about me dating anyone. I rarely got invited to parties. So, I spent my time escaping to other worlds through books, Dungeons & Dragons, and video games. The nostalgia of Stranger Things definitely speaks to me.

My genre of choice was generally fantasy. I read a lot of sword and sorcery stuff and I wrote my book reports with great joy. My 8th grade class found my report on The Princess Bride especially entertaining. For my final book report, one book wasn’t enough. I tackled the entire Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. My book report was 13 pages long. In retrospect, that seems short, but in 8th grade it felt like a full length novel. My teacher called it a masterpiece. I reveled in that praise and couldn’t wait to write my own epic sword and sorcery adventure.

In high school, I sort of reinvented myself. I joined the football team freshman year and hovered in the grey area between the popular kids and the nerds for most of my high school career. I still had that epic fantasy adventure marinating in my brain, but hormones, a rigorous curriculum and a social life stole time from reading and writing for pleasure. In the second semester of senior year, I took a fiction writing class. I wrote two fairly decent short stories by the end. The first was kind of heavy. It was a fictionalized version of my own suicide attempt earlier that year. It was cathartic and made me feel like a “real writer”. The second was about a guy who goes on a short road trip looking for a girl he met 2 years prior. The voice was carefree and humorous. I had a lot of fun writing it.

Over the summer between high school and college, I started pulling the epic fantasy out of my head and putting it on paper. Like many aspiring fantasy authors, I got lost in the world building. I taped a bunch of pieces of paper together and created a huge map, naming continents, drawing borders, rivers, forests and mountain ranges. I had a geographical and political landscape, but I didn’t have a story, or even characters. It was, however, the first time I thought about exploring modern themes through the lens of fantasy. I had moved past adventure for the sake of adventure, but my life experience to that point was basically just high school. And not even an interesting high school - a private all boys catholic high school. So my grand idea was to explore the seven deadly sins manifested as actual demons terrorizing the paper world I had created.

Then, life happened: College, marriage, two kids, a Ph.D. in Oceanography. That was my dream. It’s a lot of peoples’ dream, but I actually did it! Arguably, I probably shouldn’t have. 18 years flew by in the blink of an eye. At 38 years old, I made the career switch to software engineering. I’m good at it. It pays the bills and then some. But, I spend the day problem solving and end the day mentally exhausted. It’s not good for writing. Before the Covid pandemic, I worked in an office near the Tampa airport. I would go to the airport on my lunch breaks. The first hour of parking was free and the wifi was free too. I ate my lunch on the drive over and spent that hour writing character sketches of random people I saw in the airport. That lit the fire again.

About a year and a half ago, my house flooded during Hurricane Milton. At first, it was a nightmare. That first week is a blur of ripping out floors and drywall and tossing possessions to the curb. But eventually, it started to feel a little liberating. I had accumulated a lot of stuff. My attachment to that stuff was weighing me down. It felt good to let go. My wife and I had to move out while the house was being repaired, so we rented an apartment in downtown St. Petersburg. Suddenly, we felt like we were in our twenties again, only this time we didn’t have small children. We had a view. We were walking to restaurants. We wondered why we hadn’t made this change sooner. We never moved back to the house. We sold it when the repairs were finished.

On top of that, I started to realize I was holding onto other things. I was holding onto other peoples’ expectations. For example, I was expected to own a house. My parents and society say that a house is the greatest investment you can make. You know what? It’s also a big pain in the ass. It did serve me well as an investment when I was younger. But now, I don’t want to spend the time on the upkeep.

So, here I am, having recently turned 50 years old. It feels like the next chapter of my life is starting. I can see myself writing fiction in retirement, but I don’t want to wait that long. The creative writing process brings me joy. When I think about creating characters and dropping them into a world to see what they do, it’s fun. I’ve started dedicating at least 20 minutes in the morning to writing. Before my brain starts solving the problems of the day. Before I write a single line of code. When my brain is the freshest, I write fiction. It’s often the best part of my day.

As a writer, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Why am I even writing this? I think it’s because I sense there are others like me. We have stories. We want to share them, but we’re afraid of not being good enough. We get so caught up in doing things right that we don’t do it at all, and we never get any better. So, I’m going to write. A lot of it’s going to suck. I hope I’ll find some kindred spirits who will be inspired to join me on this journey.