July 30, 2015 – Blog post
The Exile
In the last post, Kathi and I had moved to Tulsa to either
etch out a new life, or salvage the old one. I’m still not sure which on
prevailed, but when the idea for this blog series came to me, I resolved to
keep it upbeat. I’m finding it difficult to adhere to that promise. However, in
concentrating on the writing instead of the life behind it, I would find it
easier. But how boring is that?
In the spirit of Family Vacation, the movie, we rolled into
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma in a mini caravan, which consisted of a rental truck and
the family car. We rented a small, but clean little house, and there began the
journey.
Kathi, as she’s mysteriously prone to do, immediately
snagged a new job as an accounts payable clerk. Her ability to land on her feet
and hit the ground running is nothing short of amazing. The love, inspiration,
and help she’s given me through the years is unfathomable. She is a Godsend.
For me, it didn’t go so smoothly. Preparing a
professional-looking resume, I sent them out in droves, only to be replied to,
for the most part, that I was overqualified. How can one over qualify
themselves into perpetual unemployment?
Looking back, the opportunity I’d always dreamed of, that of
being a fulltime writer, was staring me in the face. At the time, though, an
innate fear of ending up homeless and eating from dumpsters blinded me to the
potential bliss. I didn’t give up on writing. The process of immersing myself
in characters and situations, helped pull me through. However, as one might
imagine, the writing I produced during that period had a rather dark slant to
it, resembling, I suspect, the stuff possibly found in Rod Serling’s secret
closet, where he kept that which was too intense for television.
The stories were pretty bad, technically, but they served
their purpose in allowing me to stretch my imagination and explore where my
writing might lead. And it isn’t surprising that I would choose dark fantasy as
an outlet. My love for reading began with fantasy, and my desire to write was
born from reading books like, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine Le Engle. There
are times when I wish I’d stuck with the genre. In fact, the discerning reader
might pick up on slight influences infused within my first two novels; Twisted
Perception, and Beneath a Buried House. With Footprints of a Dancer, I
attempted to open the gates a bit too much. With the fourth novel in the
series, which I hope to have out within the year, I believe I’ve struck a
proper balance between the worlds of mystery and fantasy. It’s my best work
yet. I know we writers always think that of our work in progress, but it goes
beyond that. I feel it with each chapter: This is the one.
Why did I backpedal into straight mystery?
More to come…
No comments:
Post a Comment