All I really ever wanted to be was a writer.
I was taught to read before I started kindergarten by a couple of retired school teachers that lived next door to us in Salem, New York. I started reading comic books at the age of six, had read Little House on the Prairie, A Wrinkle in Time and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by the time I was ten, and was eating up all the insightful comics criticism I could get my hands on (mostly in the pages of The Comics Journal) by the time I was 13. Gary Groth and cat yronwode were gods to me. I once racked up a $50 long-distance bill because I wanted to talk to cat about comics and didn't know how much the call would cost. My god, she was kind.
My teens were spent devouring the works of Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others. I loved to read, and the more you read, for some of us, the more you want to write.
I wrote about comic books for many years, occasionally even getting paid for pieces online, in magazines and one time, in a book, even. The Comics Journal paid me nearly $300 for an essay about the future of comics retailing, and I thought I had made it, in some way. I wrote news most of the years I worked in radio, and I even wrote a radio commercial for a friend's business after I was lucky enough to escape the industry. Rare is the week I have not written something in the past 35 years, but I don't really consider myself a writer, per se.
When I spent a year working for a financial planner, a lot of that time was spent writing, from press releases and working on his website to creating the first chapter and outline for a self-help financial book that I proposed ghost writing for him. Like almost everything, he was excited about that for a week or two and then got distracted by something shiny on the other side of the room. The year after that, while looking for full time work, I wrote part-time for a regional travel magazine. I estimated at one point that based on the fees I got for each piece and the frequency of the publication, I would max out at about $1,200 a year. Honestly that would probably be more than I ever made in any other year just strictly for writing, but not one-twentieth what it would take to even begin to hold up my end of the marital budget.
The first time I think I was "serious" about writing was when I wrote my first (and only) novella, The Bane of the Bear Man, around 1988. I was inspired to make it the first of a series of six tales, which I called The Camelot Cycle. These were to be highly fictionalized stores about the people I went to college with. In the event, I only ever finished Bear Man, which ended in a spectacular shoot-out at the Plattsburgh International House of Pancakes, and those who read the thing (which I no longer possess a copy of) praised it and encouraged me to write more, but I only wrote a few dozen pages of the follow-up, The Mall, which followed the few survivors of Bear Man into a weird dystopian existence inside the Aviation Mall in Queensbury, New York after a vague catastrophe that might have been a nuclear war but maybe not. The other four novellas went unwritten, although they did have titles and the last one I had a pretty good picture of in my mind, involving as it did the then-seemingly-inevitable death by AIDS of the most promiscuous of our college cohort. He did not contract HIV to the best of my knowledge, but did end up fathering over half a dozen kids by many various women, a plot point that I could have had some fun with if I had foreseen it at the time.
The stalling out of that series of fictional stories was probably spurred by a non-fiction story I wrote in the early 1990s which was an in-depth examination of my first serious, long-term romantic relationship, which got very complicated after the first few delusional months of bliss and involved actual tragedy and not a small bit of jeopardy for us both. The writing of it was a turning point for me in both self-examination and self-expression. I found I had opened up a new avenue in my mind that allowed me to access memories and feelings while writing with a power and immediacy that is not there when I am not writing. This may not be a revelation to you, but it was to me. Even now, over a quarter of a century after writing it, when I re-read it, which is not often, I am astonished to find details of things I experienced that I do not consciously remember in that level of detail anymore, but I also remember that those memories came to me in the process of writing it originally. Writing, for me, can unlock internal doors behind which are wonders I can't imagine unless I examine them through the very process of writing.
Despite all this writing and thinking about writing, I have never considered myself a writer. I'm not sure what it would take to really feel like a writer deep into my soul, but it would probably require earning a living wage doing nothing but writing and tasks closely associated with writing, like book tours and radio interviews about my wonderful new work. And no, that's not a fantasy I really have ever entertained. I am more self-aware than that.
I don't think I have much fiction in me. The Bane of the Bear Man is the only fiction I ever completed. I started an eerie story called The Doors to Midwich once, and was pleased by how it opened, but I had no idea where it went from there, and no idea how to get an idea. I don't think of myself as a writer, but I definitely don't think of myself as a fiction writer. I knew this pretty early on. Marvel Comics once asked me to pitch to write a Thor mini-series based on a premise by the then-publisher of the company (they were trying to hire a lot of comics critics as writers back then), and after a weekend spent considering it, I realized not only did I not have fiction about Thor within me, but I didn't really have fiction within me more generally.
One night recently, I woke up needing to pee at about 3 o'clock in the morning. As I looked around the bathroom, I noticed with a visceral fear reaction a house centipede clinging to the inside of an open cabinet door. Usually, I have read, they flee from light, and I think I have only seen three of them in my entire life. This one was about two inches long and had about seven thousand legs. I fought the urge to kill it, as I understand they are harmless and kill other household pests, but I was struck by my instinctual need to make that thing die or at least disappear. There was a part of my brain engaged that I have rarely felt activated in my 52 years on this planet.
The following day, on my ride in to work, I was listening to Vermont Public Radio, as I do about 60 percent of my commuting time. The Vermont Edition that occupied the noon hour was their "Bug Show," which I took to be an occasional special version of the program, and the guest was a Vermont entomologist. At some point, someone used the term "entomological," and, always unable to avoid making connections between unrelated things, I thought about my favourite Supertramp song, "The Logical Song." I wondered if anyone had ever written an essay called "The Entomological Song." If Nabokov were alive today, he might have, and he certainly would have done a better job.
Supertramp seemed like one of the best bands in the world to me in the early 1980s, when I knew more about music than I did about sex, but really knew nothing about either. I know a lot more about both now (some in part thanks to Nabokov), enough to know that Supertramp was kind of an interesting band for its time but not one for the ages, and while I wouldn't change the radio station if they came on, neither would I make a playlist of their great songs (four, maybe?) to listen to on my commute.
There are a lot of 1980s bands that I loved then that I don't listen to much or at all anymore. I am embarrassed by how much I loved the first Hooters CD, for example. (Yes, believe it or not there is more than one, although four or five of them are greatest hits CDs for a band that had maybe four hits total.) Or how important it once was to me to create the perfect Phil Collins/Genesis mix tape combining the best of his solo work with the best of his Genesis stuff. There's not much of it at all that I care to hear anymore. And yet some music from around that same time sticks with me. Phil's former bandmate Peter Gabriel, for example, although my interest in his first three albums is limited to a song or two on any of them at best. But his fourth album, So, I still love pretty unreservedly. I think "Sledgehammer" is the greatest rock song of the 1980s. Don't argue with me. The only song on that album I usually skip these days is "Don't Give Up," because hey, you're not the boss of me, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. I still respect U2 for most of the first half of their career creating music, but I can't honestly say I feel I ever need to hear another thing by them, old or new.
This essay, by the way, is going nowhere, like the Talking Heads on that famous road they were on once. It was inspired by a few different things all happening at around the same time, but has failed to come together brilliantly like the end of a particularly good episode of Seinfeld would have. The last element I will mention that inspired it was an essay by my sometimes-colleague and very good long-distance friend Tegan O'Neill, who sometimes writes in this fascinating mode where she is writing about two or three things at the same time, trading off topics from paragraph to paragraph, and I thought it would be interesting to see if I could pull that off. It is apparent to me now that I can't, and I apologize to her for trying, although hopefully she'll be flattered that I tried.
For a week, this essay existed only as three sentences in a draft in my Gmail: The opening bit about wanting to be a writer, the part about trying to ghost write for that financial planner, and that part about the goddamned house centipede. If I hadn't seen that thing, I might not have paid as much attention to the Bug Show on Vermont Edition, and I certainly would not have thought of conflating "Entomological" with a Supertramp song. Interestingly, I also confused "entomological" with "etymological" for longer than I can bear to tell you, but which provides a nice ironic note for those writers among you.
And because it's a sometimes wonderful, sometimes clichéd way to end an essay, I'll end as I began: All I really ever wanted to be was a writer.
