A Proper Introduction

Let's start this like any initial meeting should start: Hi, my name is Chris and I have a writing problem.

I've been at it, on and off, for most of my young adult life. My love of reading and writing began with Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber", which I must have read and re-read over ten times. In case you're unfamiliar (likely), it was a fantasy story about a family of titanic, crafty immortals vying for lordship over 'the one true reality' of Amber. It was one of the many worlds style books and rife with heroism, sarcasm, a bit of intrigue, some classic deus ex, and plenty of religious symbolism (the latter aspect was one of Zelazny's hallmarks).

Sadly, Zelazny died long before I realized I had to meet the man and I learned of his death something like a year and a half after it happened in '95. This crushed me; I worshiped this series and to know I'd never meet the man who wrote it was upsetting. To this day I refuse to read novels alleging to pick up where he left off that were written by other authors. Proving that I was kind of a moron, I didn't actually read any of his other stuff until much later on in my life.

I was captured more by the characters in his stories and their dynamics than anything else. I wrote my first stories about things that I had in my life, one was a many worlds story that was basically ripped straight from the Amber mythos that I craftily titled "Ruby" because I'm an ingrate. It wasn't anything worth mentioning besides the fact that I filled a 3 subject notebook with my inane scribbles and lost it sometime in the many years since. If I ever find it I might even transcribe a bit as a jab at my younger, stupider self.

After that I wrote something a little less derivative (only a little) about a game I was playing at the time called Infantry (and I think most 90's gamer nerds will have had some experience with that one) which involved energy guns, combat suits and flying surfboards. I would write that in a notebook too, ripping off the classes and the game dynamics while generating my own story about how it all came to be.

A friend of mine at the time would read it once or twice a week and comment on it until I took it off the rails and had the characters sucked in to a medieval setting through some sort of reality rift. This, I think, is where I first started to show a dueling ethos in my head: the more I consumed things the more my writing became this weird mash up of things I liked, gradually being copies of things less and less.

I wrote a story about mutants after that, which I thought was pretty clever but was mostly just me reading old X-Men comics after I inherited them due to a family member's passing. There was some pretty cool technologies in it, and I specifically remember the ISS making a big appearance as a massive intergalactic defense station (Master of Orion 2 was loaded up on my computer). This story made it in to the hands of my English teacher at the time, something which still embarrasses me to this day. I don't remember him commenting on it, possibly because he didn't actually read it. If so I'm quite certain I dodged a bullet; it was awful.

Now we're homing in a bit closer to the end of high school when I spent a lot of time writing a novel I called Azure (Zelazny would have sued my face off at this point). That one was all about magic and reality bending stuff, trying to tie magic in to the setting and the people in a believable way. My girlfriend at the time absolutely loved the story and when we broke up many years later I handed her the 3 subject notebook that contained the original work. The story still exists on my hard drive coming in at 146,309 words of utter garbage. I edited the work laboriously for many months before determining it would never be picked up, at least not in that form. But I'm a firm believer in the 'first novel is trash, and toss it' bit of wisdom, and will happily never seek print for it.

I took a long vacation from writing after the last piece. Looking back, it was the best thing for me: I grew up a lot and shed the last of my rampant plot robbery in the intervening years. I gained a real respect for reading and found many more genres once I let myself get away from it. That takes us up to now, where I'm working on a piece called RAM, which I'll talk about in later updates.

So that's my history, and I'm sticking to it.