Thursday, June 12, 2008

Why am I doing this again?

So. Hello there...um, nobody. Probably. I suppose until and unless someone reads this, what I'm doing here is more of a journal than a blog, but whatever. That's probably no different than about 95% of all the other blogs out there, so why not join the party? I'm sure in no time at all I'll be getting so many hits I'll be able to start running ads for the revenue, but until then...

My name is Mark, and my hobby is writing. It's not even close to being my avocation; that's computer IT. I find writing to be sometimes relaxing, sometimes exciting, sometimes aggravating; always worthwhile. It's a good thing to get things out of your head and onto the page. (Hard drive. Whatever.) It doesn't really matter what it is that's being transferred from head to page -- fiction, wants and loves, streams of consciousness, this -- but it's a good exercise to do it. It's good brain exercise. And like all exercise, the more you do it the better you get at it. My particular form of exercise is fiction.

I've been writing since I was 14 years old. It began when -- I could not possibly say why -- I started banging out the text to Stephen King's Firestarter on someone's typewriter. My dad's, I think. It's possible I was bored that afternoon. Anyway it didn't take long for that to get old, and it wasn't much longer after that when I began to wonder what happened to the characters after the book was finished. So I decided to find out for myself by continuing the story.

Now at this point Mr. King is either laughing his ass off, or calling a lawyer. Whoa there, relax! It didn't go anywhere. I churned out about two dozen handwritten pages before it died a well-earned death, but the damage was done: I was hooked.

I'll probably get into the history of by efforts at some point, but for now that was just an introduction to why I started writing.

Around the same time I began to read adult books. (I mean, books for grownups, not erotica.) Actually, Firestarter might have been the first one I read. It was certainly one of the first. And so other than talking about writing, I'll also be talking about reading, what I'm reading, what it means to me, and how it affects what I wright -- because it does; a lot.

So, stay tuned. Maybe someone will read this one day, and then we'll have something here. You know: an actual blog.

2 comments:

dbkundalini said...

Hi Mark,

"So. Hello there...um, nobody."

I'm nobody, and I read your blog post on writing, brain exercise!

The part you said about freewriting, I think, is probably true. It inspired me a little to get busy. The other day I read someone's blog who said they write in the dark.

I've tried turning the computer monitor off and just typing, but I tend to think too much of getting done and don't seem to enjoy the process.

Mark said...

Hi db; thanks for posting, however you found me. Writing in the dark or with the monitor turned off are interesting exercises, but I'm sure if I tried them the only result would be a dramatic increase in the number of typos I'd have to fix.