Welcome to the cheap seats!
What is this like version 4.0?
I believe it is just that. It’s been a while since there has been any wordslinging going on here, but I’m back to do just that. I’ve been in a bit of a media blackout for the past few years. There has been a lot going on outside of writing. I got married. My artist wife and I launched a photography business to compliment her art and graphic design.
The story studio has been on the shelf, but that isn’t to say I haven’t been writing. I’ve ghostwritten a few books. Written a ton of non-fiction copy for different sites under different names. Most of my time has been dedicated to the photography aspect of our businesses. Weddigs, events, portraits and commercial photography. It’s been a busy year.
While 2018 has been a year of photography, 2019 is getting back to the page.
So why are we here?
Simply put, it’s time to start publishing poetry again. It’s time to start publishing stories again. I’m not going with something as ambitious as the million-word challenge I did a few years ago. (That was producing a million words of copy in a year. It was fun. I may do it next year, but it’s not the focus for this year.
This year is about finding a new balance. Blogging is to be a big part of that. I’ll be slinging words on several blogs. This one obviously, but also over at the Wicked Good Life and at Mouse Island Creatives (the parent company of all of this).
The Cheap Seats will (for those of you who used to follow along) be still the place where I come to give you the reader a behind the scenes look at the story creation process. It’s not all about the word counts or a lot of the talk about how important I am bull that gets regurgitated on a lot of sites out there. This is just an author talking about his process.
Writing Resources
There are a lot of great writing resources out there. This in time will be a place to find things that will help other authors with their craft. It’s been years now since the Self Publishing Roundtable shut down and an extra year since I ended my short stint on there, but unlike the interviews we did there, the resources will be in the form of tips and tricks and methodology vs news and conversations with other indie authors about the craft.
False Awakenings
False Awakening are what I call my short stories. I don’t remember the exact date or period in my life that I started calling them this, but it was over half a lifetime ago. It arose from a period in my life where I had very lucid dreams. I began keeping a dream journal and from that journal I created short stories from them. That just became what I called them. I’ve written hundreds of short stories over the years, most of them are gone now, some are published under different pen names. Most were pathetic shit that should that deserved to die a horrible death in the trunk.
As 2019 rolls out I am cleaning the trunk, moving everything that was in there or in the queue to be written to the recycle bin. I think it is good to clean the slate every now and again. New beginnings. I’ll be posting a few stories on here for free, most I’ll be selling in the yet to be opened bookstore. Lots coming in 2019.
Lucid Dreams
Much like the false awakenings lucid dreams became what I call my poetry. It’s partly because that is what the often feel like. Shattered fragments of a beautiful images, like looking at a work of art being reflected in jagged remnants of a broken mirror on faded tile. My poetry is often short. Sometimes as short as a single line. It’s free verse mostly and a lot of times more prose than poetry. I will on occasion write something a shade more traditional in form, but I usually just see where the though, the image takes me. When it is a song, that is when the rhythm appears, but it’s a little more rare that they rhyme.
I don’t think I have a defined style, I know my older works used to explore the darker side of things. Instead of love, I’d explore loss. In a lot of ways, the younger works were more about shock value. Written to make the reader feel discomfort, but it evolved into an exploration of the human condition. Entertaining on some levels and heartbreaking on others. I’m not purging the Dreams the way I am the awakenings, but the reason for that is far simpler. I’ve dabbled in writing short stories to compliment the ghostwritten novels I’ve been doing. Poetry has been a locked door that I’ve misplaced the key to.
In truth, I see it more like a chest with a unbreakable lock. No blunt force can break it, no saw can cut it. It can be unlocked or it can be picked. I may not be able to go to the place I was when I wrote from the darkest place in my soul and not even in my soul, in my imagination. I’ve never lived in the darkness I wrote about, I explored it from an analytical disconnection within myself. I projected and removed myself from the experience. While I can take credit for the imaginative nature of the work, it is the ability to treat the poetry as if it was a character writing not myself. I’m sure there is a lot of psychoanalysis that could be done on that, maybe that is why I write under pseudonyms. Who knows.
Rambling over. The short of it is, I’m going to be writing poetry again and I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be mixing in the old with the new in the hopes of picking the lock and sprining the melodic words from their prison.
Story Shop
Eventually, the story shop will be up and running. This will be a place to purchase novels, short stories, ect. While I’m not just getting too lazy to create another section, I’ll also be talking about the cover design services we offer at Mouse Island Creatives by way of Mouse Island Design. My wife has 20 years experience doing graphic design including print and ebook layout design to compliment her illustration and cover design skills. She is a digital wizard and a talented author. WIthout her, this page would still be parked the way I did after I shut things down years ago.