Tag Archives: writing life

5 Things which can change your life and how they changed mine.

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For most of my life, I’ve lived in the shallow end. I did only what I needed, I wouldn’t rock the boat and I never wanted to do the things which made me happy, I always did things which made those around me happy, or things I believed would make them proud.

Living that way taught me a few things:

  1. You can’t make others happy, regardless of how hard you try.
  2. You must to what makes you happy, to hell with everyone else.
  3. Your immediate family (which for me is my wife, kids and dog) are the ones who will support you no matter what.
  4. What you choose to do creatively can be the most important thing in your life and will give you more guidance than any book, speech of movie.
  5. You must find peace within yourself to do anything worthwhile creatively.

These five are the biggest things I’ve dealt with in my life and I’m going to go through them and tell you how I discovered the importance of each.

For Number One.

My biological dad has been out of my life for most of my adult life, this is a mutual thing and though I’ve tried and he’s tried, we can’t reach a point where we are amicable to each other.

When I was a kid I played soccer because my parents wanted me to, I was 4 and had no choice. When I was six, I started playing ice hockey, and though initially I did it because of my parents, I began to love the game and watching hockey, especially playoff hockey is a part of who I am today.

In my teens and toward my senior year in high school I wanted to do something which would make my dad proud, I enlisted in the Marines, and was discharged after failing tests in receiving.

I started college because I wanted to make him proud and it was my best way out of a bad situation, I failed at that too, completing only a year with poor academics.

When I moved to Las Vegas it was because I had no place to live as my biological dad and step-mom asked me to leave because of my relationship with my then girlfriend and present wife. Along with their not being happy with my relationship and my academics I left with my sister for Las Vegas, my girlfriend followed me to Vegas a month later.

I began writing again in 2001 after insistence from a friend and encouragement from my wife.

Initially I did because I wanted my dad again to be proud of me being published, but that never happened. After a reconciliation after my son’s birth in 2004 and eventual falling out, we didn’t talk until around 2009 when my daughter was born. That reconciliation like the previous one, didn’t end well and I’ve moved on.

I learned that my biological dad will never be satisfied with anything I do and the only person I should make proud of my achievements is myself.

For Number Two.

Along with the falling out I had with my biological dad, my sisters and a few other parts of the family stopped talking to me.

This taught a great lesson: Your family will not be there when you need them, and you must do only which satisfies yourself and ignore what everyone says about you.

I’ve since reconnected with my sisters and those other parts of my family and they are some of my greatest supports now. I don’t know how I could have dealt with my grandfather’s funeral without all of them!

For Number Three.

When others gave up on me for falsehoods they were told, my wife stood by me, and without her by my side the last sixteen years, I’m not sure I could have handled everything as well as I have.

For Number Four.

When I began writing again, I read books, watched documentaries and began following creatively gifted people on social media. I learned they are as clueless as the rest of us when it comes to how they got published or why they’re successful in their art.

Neil Gaiman said it best in his commencement speech, “Sometimes people get hired, because they get hired.” Which is the best example of how artists, writers and actors make it in their fields.

Neil Gaiman and others worry that they’ve perpetrated to some crime in their success and worry that their will come a time when someone will show up and take everything away.

I choose to write for myself, not because doing it for anyone else didn’t give me the results I wanted, but because I like to see the stories which come out and I enjoy coming up with the ideas, characters and worlds which come out so wonderfully on the page.

For Number Five.

Through all the things I’ve dealt with in my life, my parents divorce when I was eight, going to 11 different school and having to adjust to each, being discharged from the Marines, family giving up on me and being estranged from my biological dad, I no longer carry any resentment toward my family, my biological dad or anyone else.

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I learned this year that dwelling on anything never helps and that meditation and living for yourself and doing the things which matter to you are the most important things you can do in your life.

Your life is your own, no one else can live your life, no one can write your stories.

Your entitled to the life you want, and don’t let anyone, anyone tell you different.

Writing and the Flicker of the Candle

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In the corner it flickers, stretching shadows, emphasizing the darkness and collapsing things around it into small dark little balls.

The candle, though small, creates its own world and as it dances in the night air we see all that it creates.

For every candle we light, another shows up in our dreams. The wick can be worn, tired, burnt, but it stands there reminding us that it was once lit.

For every story we write, the wick burns farther down, but that is a deception for the wick may look worn, tired and burnt but it’s still there.

The reality is that we look at the wick, never the candle. The wick is where our stories come from, the candle is only holding them, just as the wick holds the light.

The darkness, though eclipsed by the light, may be its own deception. Is the darkness hiding from the light, or is the light hiding from the darkness.

We see the light stretch across the room, but the darkness, it hides in the corners, in the folds of the candle wax. It comes out when the light fades, drifting up through the wax, around the top and spreading out across the room.

The darkness, willing itself through the spaces, the nooks and crannies finding its way to the places in the room where the light once stood.

But in its search for more places to hide, the darkness seeks something greater, it wants to be inside our mind.

In the darkness of our mind we create the darkness which stood in the wax. We create monsters, killers and anti-heroes.

But in this darkness we pull the darkness in our reality and put it on the page every day.

Whether our reality is disturbed by the things we pull from our darkness is another thing, but putting that darkness on the page is our release, much the way our night-time dreaming is a release from our daily activity.

In our release we set free the darkness to share with others.

 

Writing and Ignoring the Grand Bargain

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What reality is this? What fantasy have we created that makes us feel more important than those around us?

The dawn comes and with it the light, the brightness and the foundations of who we are. Throughout our writing there are two things that come together as a means to halt our writing.

  1. Our lack of faith in our writing.
  2. Those who wish to distract us or deride us from the task of writing.

Each of these are part of the Grand Bargain of Writing.

The bargain is that we knowingly accept what we’re getting into, even if we don’t understand what we’re getting into.

We knowingly accept that we may become famous as other writers have done. But, we also take into account that we’re alone in our task of writing.

The solitude of writing is one the things a lot of people either can’t handle or they’re worried about other things going wrong.

For myself, the things I worry about are the ability to multitask all of the things I have going on. From day-job, blog, wife, kids and my fiction writing.

My biggest worry is that something will get lost in balancing act.

My reason for this has a lot to do with childhood and the things I’ve dealt with my entire life concerning abandonment issues, which plays into the worry of losing my wife or kids through the solitary life of a writer.

I risk losing things I care about because I’m a writer and have known that for over twenty years, it just took me a while to take a chance on it, and that my wife supports me and tells me she just wants me to write makes the risk less, but it’s still in the back of my mind every time I sit down.

My day-job isn’t much of worry and honestly if it weren’t for the healthcare I’d quit.

But a lot of day-jobs are like that.

Reality and the life we choose as writers, the solitary life of doing something we love, something that we feel in our soul, is enough for us to say to hell with the Grand Bargain and do it anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

Thankful for this Writing Life.

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When I was 18, I knew what I wanted to be–a Marine–what I wanted to do and I had a plan for how to get there..

It’s been nearly 20 years since I left boot camp without graduating and I still think about it.

I know there’s a reason I’ve been on this path the last twenty years, but I’m not sure what it is yet, but I think I’m getting closer.

Like being a Marine, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a teenager.

I loved creating something from nothing and discovering new worlds.Writing for me was a power trip, especially growing up when I didn’t have any power.

I started writing again ten years ago when a friend said, “You read a lot Brian, you should write something. You’re a smart guy, you should write.”

I wrote a few short stories after that and in 2004, just before my son was born I started writing a novel, it was my first and I learned a lot from the process.

Last year I finished me second novel, and have written a lot of short stories since then.

This year hasn’t been as strong as last year, but I’ve learned a lot from writing short stories.

For twenty years I’ve been on this path, but since I started writing again I’ve begun to feel more like the kid from Wyoming who wanted to be a Marine.

I’m finding that writing is fun, life is a pain in the ass and that I have an amazing wife who’ll support me no matter what I want to be. Along with our kids I’m sure I’ll find my way.

My path doesn’t include dress blues or the Marine Corps hymn like I wanted it to twenty years ago, but I’m enjoying the writer’s path and spending time with the wife I have, our kids and I”m thankful for being where I am and finally discovering who I am.