fabld

Research is fun for me. Yeah, I am full of that “hidden away in the mountains in a secret facility dedicated to world-ending science gone awry” research whimsy. Like Amy Pohler on uber-geek pills. I love to learn, I love to know, and use the things I learn somehow. Ahhh! I will write about them in stories! I learn literary things from everything I watch or read. What fun for me.

I assume most normal people (strange breed) watch TV, movies, etc. yano, for the blithering “fun” of it. Being entertained until their eyeballs ache from boredom and their brains mush-out to the delightfulness of the rehashed plot in the newest mundane continuation of redone plot lines for the 100th time. Oh, that’s right, THIS show has a brand spanking new TITLE! What do I win bob? Sings: title title title title title, ti-i-tul! (like price is right music). You occasionally find new ideas in shows that change the game. And most of the time when that happens, FOX will cancel it if you’re lucky. To my man Joss, holla!

Everything I do is research for a story. TV is mostly devoid of new ideas but there are some bones with scraps left on them I can pick clean, or put in my radioactive mind and let them fester into something entirely different than that for which they were intended. I call this “moar fun” of course. I am discovering (yes, right now my shovel is in the ground unearthing stuff) that this insane and out-of-control mind the maker himself saddled me with is quite good at things I have always been afraid of. Like quirkiness and non-logical synapsical (new word) connections. Eidetic memory, or very close to it, has been a negative thing in my life. I can’t forget things. Like when someone hurts me and is sorry. I try to forgive, but it is nearly impossible to me to forget. I still feel hurt by them and that the relationship is damaged. I wish I didn’t, I try hard not to, but it doesn’t help. This is also a good thing for remembering sights, sounds, feelings, impressions, atmospheres I’ve been in with alarming detail. If you play a song from my teen years, I can repaint the whole scene in my mind, where, who, when, what, and what people were wearing, down to their thoughts and actions at that point, as if they are a snapshot of themselves living on in my mind, far more detailed than anyone else. It is hard to believe, but that is super useful as a storyteller, world-builder, and writer.

Of course, I wouldn’t be a proper story-teller or writer without an extreme wacked out over-active sense of humor and imagination. They run off together into the sunset skipping down the trail. See. I love to daydream, imagine worlds and situations that I’ve been in or seen, and mashup disparate portions of reality in my head, into grand and sometimes frightening amalgamations. I enjoy screwing with the reality we all take for granted and live in a fantasy world much of the time. I often imagine words are really hiding places for other, smaller, more timid words. Sometimes I can’t quite break the smaller word’s encryption and find out how they fit into that big-brother words space and lettering. I try my head at creating cyphers of smaller words that could be new web 2.0 company names, but mine don’t make the cut unless they sound somewhat natural and not contrived. Most of them do, and would be fine as web 2.0 company names, but let’s face it, someone in this world needs to have some respect of self or fictional entities, so there’s that.

I guess my major problem with all this is that I don’t feel like I have my own permission to act and be who I feel I am with these weird and complicated faculties. Because I grew up thinking that people and the connection with them (regardless of their relation or bond with me) are to be revered and bowed to, no matter what, I am afraid to let loose. I don’t know what me looks like, because even fun well-meaning idiots put a damper on my rendition of myself (were I to populate a planet on my own and do exactly as I wish). This is part of being an aspie, that I lack the social and coping skills to ward off the meanies, but I have been so used to letting them get the last word that I don’t think I really care anymore and they can all be summarily darned to heck!

How does one like me embark on a journey of me-ness, ignoring all the pundits of conformity, and leave that old bland, boringful self behind me? I guess I will just have to follow ke$ha’s advice: “let the crazy ouuuuuut.” Join me won’t you?

I love that phrase in the title. I am “living with aspergers” because it is my life, but also because I find it hilarious.

Let’s fictionalize it this way: My wife and I have a three-way marriage. She is married to me, I am married to her, and we both are unwillingly (and for a while unknowingly) married to a slightly autistic person who might behave like a (not redundant) pretentious cat “occasionally”. Asperger’s is quite like living with another person in your house, in your life, in your body. It is very not fun and very sci-fi at the same time.

I imagine the conversation with my wife upon realizing there is another person living with us, uninvited…

“So, how long has he been there?” asks my wife.

“I think, all my life.” – me

“And you never noticed him there?” -wife

“Well, no, I did, but I just thought he was me, conveniently lying still so I could get a look at myself. It didn’t seem weird.” - me

“There’s a you on our couch.” -wife

“I’m aware of that now, yes, and I do see how strange it is, now that you mention it.” - me

“Um…” -wife

“Everything, including normal is weird to me, so in my defense, this didn’t seem weirder than anything else.” - me

“Hmmm. So, what do we do now?” -wife

“With the other me on the couch?” - me

“What else would I be talking about?” -wife

“Who knows, women switch contexts on me all the time without any warning.” - me

“Well, I didn’t. Yes, what do we do with the you on the couch.”  -wife

“I don’t know, what do we normally do with me?” - me

“I don’t think that will work.” -wife

“Why not, he’s me, just, not.” - me

“He’s not you, he’s more mean or sharp or something. He’s the dark side of you I guess.” -wife

“He is still me though.” - me

A pause while we both ponder this ill-received guest and his eternal stay with us.

“Ahhh, I know.” says my wife. “We’ll give him bacon when he wakes up.”

“Could you be any cuter right now?” - me

“Maybe, I’m not wearing makeup.” -wife

“Yeah, you don’t need any.” - me

I’m pretty sure that is close to how it would go. I think I suck at dialog, do I? Can you tell? Is it compelling? Or no?

I love coffee. Didn’t know that until I was (I think) 18 and working at my first real job.

I love tea, and toast, and sweatshirts. I am a younger, less british, and slightly more hip version of an English grammar Nazi living in dreary Europe somewhere. Oh yeah, my mother called me melancholy to no end, I love rainstorms and grey dismal skies. I am invigorated by dark things. I love the strange and mysterious. I should have known I was a writer. Now I do. Which is why I can’t let bygones go by.

I am the embodiment of every writing cliche you’ve ever heard. I am moody, quite a pain in the rear to almost everyone, have certain words, names and consequently people I don’t like due to their unfortunate names or the spellings thereof. I love words, down to a finite level. I like big words not because they sound more sophisticated and make me sound smart, no, I love them because they more adequately describe things. Sometimes supercalifragilistic is the only thing that best describes a thing. I also like to speak recursively. Such as the departmentof redundancy department.

I think in large over-arching terms about philosophical things without letting much of the drivel in the news-media invade my skull. I play God for a living and create web programming experiences that thousands of people must interact with and be sold things to, by. If that made no sense, I don’t care, I am an elitist who defies traditional grammar and likes to bend the rules when I wish. This is what blogging is for, no?

I don’t make mistakes just progressions and cutting edge concepts you may not get because I’m so uber. In short, I believe that writers, by virtue of what we do in the world and what we create, are and have to be, essentially, well, cats. I certainly have the demeanor and personality of a cat. I wish to be left alone for long periods of time to work on what I consider the most important thing in the universe, if it weren’t in my estimation, why would I or anyone else do it? I am basically Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. I think and sometimes act (when I let it show) like Sheldon. My family doesn’t believe me, or understand me, but that is the best description of who I am I can find, WHETHER OR NOT anyone sees the effects of it. I am a very hidden and private person. So much so that I wouldn’t tell you what I really think even if I had the time to wrestle it out, merely because I like to keep things to myself. Most of the time though, I simply have to think  too much to composite a line of thought on a subject from the galaxies that are floating around in my head, like a never ending network of Wikipedias made entirely of Kevin Bacon’s degrees of separation to other humans.

I am helplessly long-winded by phone, email, online whatever, (twitter drives my verbose self quite bonkers and it every other way you can imagine. I can’t be a part of any social group because they do not meet long enough to accommodate what I have to say. if I care about the topic. Most of the time I can get by, standing by myself, drinking punch, and avoiding eye contact.

See what I mean?

I have found my bliss. Well, my second one. Well, okay, I guess you might be able to count it as my third. I used to be in IT. Help desk or end-user support. I used to be the sole tech support person for a 200K warehouse for a medical company. That was the longest job I’ve ever had and I had a blast doing it. It was there in the midst of the most stressful job that I found the time and energy to learn PHP and code. I was also learning and using VB (visual basic) inside Microsoft Access to build the coolest thing I have ever built. A distributed database system that used access on the desktop and connected to MySQL on the web to provide truly ubiquitous access to a company tracking system for training and standard operating procedures. We even created the first and best naming conventions for policies and documents that the company had been lack-luster in providing to their facilities management teams, though they required compliance to the letter.

This was my second calling, web programming, code, back end and front end. That is what I am still doing today, many years later. I love code, I love the web, and I like making things work where they were non-existent before. I love the power and joy of pure creation.

That translates into my third calling, or at least the variety I find myself in this year for the first time. I guess to say “third” is a misnomer, since writing is my first love from when I was a kid. Through very strange and unusual circumstances, I had left that part of me far behind and haven’t gone back to it until now.

My wife tells me that I am the happiest when I am writing something, like in November when I wrote my novel. Something I care about, something “big”. It all seems epic and big to me. I have never fancied myself a story-teller, but I think I am. I love writing, I love stories, and I love literature. When that was my favorite subject in school I should have taken notice to that.

So, in November, I wrote my first novel. As part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) I competed against myself to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days or less. Mine, Polymorphism: Cult of the Pigtailed Shapeshifter, is about a girl who is good with computers, and gets sucked into her favorite online game. Her life is turned upside down by amazing superpowers — even in real life — that she can’t control, much like everything else in her life. People all have their own ideas for Polly, the main character, and don’t care to listen to her thoughts on her future. It seems that an ancient power deep beneath the earth has other ideas for Polly too, only she has to wonder what will happen to her, friends, and the whole earth for that matter if she doesn’t step in and save the day.

There is a world of computer characters who need to see the light, a mysterious machine hidden far beyond human eyes, and a malevolent force bigger than anything in the video game she loves to play and most of all a mission her life is meant to fulfill.

I wrote it in a month. It isn’t great. The idea, the plot is decent, but not well executed yet. It needs work. A lot of work. I need to figure out how to do it, where to start, how to fix systemic problems and get it in good shape, if for no other reason than my children want to read/hear my story. If it gets published and loved my millions, fine by me, but I only want (at first) to make something good enough for my kids to read and love. That is the hallmark of quality and readability. I wish to produce a velveteen booklet, though worn by time and aged by love it stands as an unflickering memory in my kids hearts, and the message it bears ever no their minds. That is my highest aim.

I do not know how to proceed at this point. This is actually harder than writing the thing as it fell out of my jumbled mind thousands of words at a time. How do I rewrite, retell, grow a set of craft-horns instantly? Should I let it sit until I know what to do with it? Do I continue to write other stories so that the variance in the subject matter, approach and style will help convince me how to fix the first one? What do I do now? Yay! I wrote a novel in 28 days (at 66.3K too) but what does that do for me except give me a bigger problem to deal with?

I’m looking for advice from published writers, people who know the biz, I am trying to embark on this journey of “self-promotion” as much as my content will sell itself if I do it right, and while I know a bit about technology, computers and the web, I don’t know a lot of stuff about writing novels. Not essays, or papers, or scrawling receipts or indignant tomes to adversaries, but novels in particular. Genre: typically Sci-fi and maybe some fantasy. Maybe YA lit, almost positively.

Step one: write something, even if it sucks. “I’ve written something sucky” is far better than “I haven’t written anything yet…” for sure. Published, pulling down several G’s in cash because of it, more awesome, but that takes time and pure stupidity clinging to hope.

If you are smart, funny, published, and hopefully some combo thereof, please tell me what you think I promise I will listen and only privately mock you in my own head. You won’t have to hear it. Struck me with your evervescent DUMB-hammar that I may learn. Thanks.