Dear Roger:Inspirations,Motivations, Writing Jags and Monkey Sex-Or things Found In A Molskine

Im on a writing bender again. It could be worse, having writers block is waay worse for me, but my muse had paid a particularly inconvenient time to pay me a visit, especially with the crowded house, the stress of trying to find a new place that I can tolerate and the holiday stress. I have 3 new stories I have cooking, one is already at over 25k the other at 15k, and the third is around 8k but its rather dark and I try to keep it on the very back burner. My other stories I have been working on all along are still just cranking out of me and I intend to wrap up 2 of them in this next week. Its really not a stress for me to write, and that makes my son a little crazy. He has been hit with writing assignment after writing assignment lately and he struggles with them. He of course waits until the last minute to ask for any help and then he harasses me when im in the middle of either writing something that is really flowing , or editing. Both situations make me a little crazy. He had been struggling to come up with a concept for his one paper and he started bouncing ideas off of me. I shot them down one after another until he was about ready to scream in frustration. All of them sounded like the sitcoms or crap he saw on tv and I told him so. I told him to draw from real life and what he saw around him. We sat and threw things back and forth until he finally grasped the concept and away he went.

Life experience is what helps me to write.I have been asked in the past where I get the ideas I write about and how I create things so quickly, but its from observation and life. Everything I see or hear or experience has been filed away and preserved so that I can draw from it at a later time. I have had some pretty depraved experiences and that has made for some of my more dark and horrific parts of my stories, I have also had some pretty damn funny things go on in my life and those have been added in as well. Every person, every voice and story and place is added to the mix and drawn from and something as simple as an expression shared between two boys in a photograph can fire off an idea that takes on a life of its own.

I spent a lot of time in college studying criminal psychology, criminal personality, things like body language and microgestures. I wanted to work for the FBI in the Behavioral Analysis Unit. I read every damn book there was to read about it, studied under some of the best professors to be found, and then life intervened, my head got scrambled up in a tumble down the I40 and it took several other knocks that left me with a wonkiness that no one wants to employ in any law enforcement capacity, but I still have all that knowledge from all those classes I got,"A's" in and all those books I read. So I study people and I use it when I write. Watching how two people move around each other or look at each other when they are supposed to be in a relationship, or others when they are just friends, it leads to some great ideas for story lines that only seem to wander through my mind at the most inconvenient of times. I get ideas when I am in the shower or almost asleep in bed or out walking in the rain, in a hurry to get somewhere. It never seems to be when I am actually sitting at my computer trying to write. One of my favorite authors,"Bukowski" said that that was how it should be though, you should only write when its burning to get out of you. Lately it has been. I dont know what I will do with it other than keep putting it up where I have been. I think about submitting it to a publisher from time to time, I have what are essentially 3 novel length stories already done, but I am so damn difficult to deal with when it comes to editing. I have that artistic temperament and my stories are my 'Vision" and much like a painter, I write them how I see them, and I write how I talk. Its often a bit crude and rough around the edges and impolite, though rarely graphic in the sex department. Weirdly enough the most graphic sex scene I wrote was in a story that involved two gay male characters. The research on that was interesting to say the least. I prefer to not smack my readers in the face with it,(so to speak) and let their imaginations do the work, but I still get reviews describing my sex scenes as,'Smoking hot" and so on, so I guess I am doing something right for someone who has failed in all real life research attempts as of late.

Writing has been my salvation my entire life. I have always done it. I write everything from stories to poems to songs to just nonsense ideas for things. My dream job would have been to be a writer, able to ensconce myself off in some Scottish croft, alone except for the occasional visitation from a hot lil number that I had flown in just to see to my needs when I wanted him, and there I would crank out my great American novels as the mood struck me, along with a few hit songs for others to sing, but life stepped in and smacked me up side the head and so I write from my bedroom in an apartment in a suburb of Portland in the wee hours of the morning, hoping to get enough time to edit and save before the dog needs out or the kids need food, and I save those experiences in my mental file for later.