Welcome

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my author website and blog section! You’ll find out much about me in the Author section of the website, but I wanted to take a moment to further describe what I’m all about.

All my life, I’ve been fascinated with great stories. As a child, I used to take naps with my father, and when I couldn’t settle down, he would tell me a story as we laid down. He wouldn’t read one, but just make something up – from scratch. He possessed a unique gift of creating a story, out of the blue, and through his words you could really visualize being there. I remember one story, where he described in intricate detail how a man in the desert (Western US – we would watch a LOT of Spaghetti Westerns and John Wayne movies), made money by collecting cactuses and extracting the juice from them, canning it, and then selling it at a premium price to thirsty travelers riding through. Thinking back, I wonder if we had just watched “The Ballad of Cable Hogue.” He was a great story teller and creative thinker, and I owe much of what I have in that regard to him.

For me, I’ve always been in love with the idea of being a writer. My family gave me my first typewriter when I was eight or nine. It was heavy, manual typewriter and it was gun-metal grey, and had the vintage feel of something from the 40’s or 50’s. I think they probably found it at a government surplus auction. I would clack away on the typewriter for hours. In middle school, when we had Computer Science “class” (everyone played Oregon Trail for an hour), my teacher (Mr. Williams) would let me write on a computer and even gave me my own 8.5” floppy disk, so I could save my stories on it. I guess he figured we were learning the necessary skill of typing on a keyboard, one way or the other, so all was good. At home, my typewriter was upgraded to a Brother AX-25 electric typewriter (which I still have!), until finally I got my first, hand-me-down PC in high school. 

Throughout the twists and turns of my life I’ve come back to story writing multiple times, and this time, I hope it sticks for good. I love thinking up great stories and sharing them, some can be dark and twisted, some can be just an escape from our current reality – we all need it, to get out of our own minds once in a while. I tend not to put in a moral component or agenda, it’s really just about honoring the tradition of sharing stories and adventures with others.

Some days the writing comes slow, some days it pours out. Sometimes you’d rather like to organize your thoughts first in a good outline – making sure it has all the classical components and structure – story arcs, climax scenes, having lovable but flawed characters. That’s great if you can do it that way – for me, the most important thing, is just to start typing. It may be nothing but gibberish at first, but it gets the juices flowing, and before you know it you’ve got something down worth having on the page. You can then build on the text or take some of it away, adding structure and notes where you find it is needed. Redrafting is easy – it’s the de novo bit that’s hard to start. Story writing is an organic birthing process, and you can have a lot of fun doing it, if you don’t take yourself too seriously. So much the better when your deadlines are set by your own motivation level.

Thanks for reading, and I hope I can share a few stories with you on my journey!

Best,
Andrew