Themeattics

You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide. You start wanting it to be done with. You find yourself saying to the sky, Just do it. Do your worst. Get it over with.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

I’d like to tell you a story.

Given what this site is about, you’d think that much would be obvious. It should be, but I think for the first time in my life I might finally mean those words.

The first story I put to paper was back in the summer of ‘98. I was on a family vacation in Orlando, out of my mind delirious from a full day at MGM Studios (a moment of silence for the dead, please) and hours at the hotel pool, when the idea hit me. It wasn’t much of one – a basic setup for a what was bound to be a trope-filled high-fantasy – but I felt its pull. At this point I can only recall three things about it: it starred one Cameron Dulas, commander of the Anansian military; a decisive, monumental battle was taking place at the gates of said city; the whole thing was absolute shit.

But I was a kid. Young, eager, and surprisingly taken in by the whole prospect of creating a world. Looking back on it, it seems strange that the thought of writing was so foreign to me then. After all, I’d lived in stories my entire life up to that point, it should have seemed the most natural thing in the world to try and make some of my own. Regardless, that was the start of it. I’ve tried to find that first draft of a first step for a long time, to no avail. It’s too bad, really. I’d love to set a place of honor for it in the attic.

So began the next phase of my life, the one dusted with the need to create. And I did. Oh, I did. Character bios. Story arcs. Game designs. One-off conversations. Intro chapters. I had my toes dipped in so many pools they were constantly cramping. But even with all that split desire and effort, one theme found its way through. I knew everything I did was terrible and was positive, absolutely certain, I couldn’t let any of it get out. You see, if it did, everyone would know I’d been wasting my time. All these hours hold up behind a screen or hunched over a notebook, all to produce unreadable garbage when I could have been doing any number of actually useful things.

Up into the attic they went.

I thought I’d gotten over that when I shared my first real bit of work with a good friend, but that turned out to be a lie. A pretty one, comfortable in its brazenness. I wrote and wrote, sharing and chatting about it so fervently that it had to be the real thing. Until I shelved it and rebuilt. Then, again, I started another and made it only a little way before shifting over to a new project which – tell me if you see a pattern here – I shared exclusively with that same friend until I finished it, made a single, halfhearted attempted to contact an agent or two, then immediately pushed it aside and started over, a new plan in mind which has been floundering on the edge of completion for months without a single effort to complete.

You see that same, hunting fear has never left. I know, somewhere deep, that I’m not great at this. Even now, more than twice the age I started it all, I can so easily see my flaws. And you will too, if I let you look in. You’ll see it’s been a waste. All this time burned away for nothing. A sad little man with used up ideas and no talent.

Again and again, into the attic they went. Buried in the dark, cloaked in musk and decades of debris.

I’m tired of it. Could anything be more a waste than creating for no one? To build, only to bury? I wouldn’t wish that sort of thing on anyone, so, after a great deal of introspection, here I am. Consider this site my personal confrontation. I hope that’s not as vain as it sounds and, though it’s just another play on the same fear, I do hope you’ll enjoy what you find here. If you don’t, so be it. Can’t please everyone.

So come on, let’s take those next few steps into the attic together. Yeah, the ladder is a little ricketier than I’d like, most of the bulbs have burned out, and I’m a little afraid of what might have taken up residence, but it’s alright. Everything I need to get things moving already up there. Take a look around. I’ll get to work.

I’d like to tell you a story.