FALSE STARTS: "Nostalgia, Pt. 2"
Sometimes a story comes to you, fully-formed and screaming, and all you have to do is listen to it and type everything it’s telling you to type. Other times, it nearly knocks you the f*ck out...
False Starts: “Nostalgia, Pt. 2”
Sometimes a story comes to you, fully-formed and screaming, and all you have to do is listen to it and type everything it’s telling you to type.
Other times, a story walks right up to you and for no reason at all it throws a solid uppercut, connecting right with the bottom of your jaw, and—to put it crudely—it knocks you the fuck out.
Closing in on about two decades of this writing thing now, I’ve had my fair share of K.O.’s. I even shared how one of those stories kicked my ass for 5 years straight (“Holus Bolus”), and you check that out here if you want to hear all the bloody details.
Today, I thought I’d share a similar experience with you, but it’s far from the same old story. This one affected me in a HUGE way. It altered the course of my entire life, actually. If you would’ve told me in 2017 that six years later I’d be thankful that all of this had happened to me back then, I would’ve thought you were crazy. It probably would have pissed me off, too.
But it’s true.
You have to understand, that’s when I hit rock bottom. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of the future and how great life could be, I was swimming in a vast sea of darkness with little hope of ever reaching the shore.
I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind a bit.
Sometime in late 2016, I was working two labor-intensive jobs that required me to work 60 hours a week. Now, as many of you know, I have a child, and at the time he was 8 years old. His mom and I haven’t been together since he was about 2, but we’ve always split our time with him 50/50, so it was important to me that even though I was working two jobs, I didn’t take any time away from him at all. I managed to work only on days/nights when I wasn’t scheduled to have him. As far as he knows, things were the same as they’d always been.
But that was far from the truth.
The truth was that, at the time, I hadn’t fully recovered financially from our divorce, and on top of that I’d spent the next few years making a series of terrible decisions regarding loans and credit cards that made things 100 times worse. Long story short: I was working 60 hours a week and was still only able to pay for my rent and the minimum payments on all my many bills (which, as you may know, was only paying down interest).
I was fucked, to put it lightly.
And Christmas was right around the corner.
Oh, and that’s when the brakes went out on my car and I had to walk ten miles to get to work every day.
Seriously, it was like a bad reality TV show that kept raising the stakes in order to keep the viewers’ interest.
I never stopped writing during this time either. I’m obviously some crazed madman, because I’ve been through some shit in my life and so far nothing has been able to totally keep me away from writing, no matter how extreme the conditions have gotten. This moment was the closest I ever came to giving the entire thing up for good, though.
I’ll get to that part in a moment.
So, I had just finished my second novel, Automated Daydreaming (do see now why it was so goddamn bleak? ha!), and I had just written a handful of stories that all took place in a weird building called Eighth Block Tower and wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.
The stories seemed to be pouring out of me. The setting I’d created in the Tower was essentially a bed of rich, fertile soil where even my weirdest of characters and story ideas could flourish.
One night, around 3am, and for no good reason, I made a bold statement on whatever social media I was rocking at the time (I think Facebook?). I said: “2017. 12 books. 12 months.”
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