quasi_sean

It is always a bit weird when I begin writing a new book.

I love writing, as most of you probably know. It is not so much a hobby as it is necessity for life. I recall when I was younger, circa 1986 or so, my first stories revolved around familes and the mayhem that ensued when they tried to take a vacation. Had I thought to throw Chevy Chase into the mix, the stories would have been a lot better, altho I'm positive that any sort of shit I might have wiped on paper would have been so much better than the debacle that is European Vacation.
Anyhoo, in my early teens, thanks in part to the nerd-boners I was sporting over Ren and Stimpy, most of my stories then centered around talking boogers and pieces of poo with personalities. I did still keep it PG-rated.
When I was 11, a buddy (the only friend I seemed to have) and myself went thru a very intense summer. We were both reading a lot of Stephen King and thru instances and exaggerations (or possibly just boredom) we began to believe that we were both being stalked by ghosts. We took it quite seriously, and sometimes felt honoured. We had something that our asshat classmates and the bully who would press our faces against the playground slide in the dead of summer didn't have. We had grown-up fucking problems with the undead. Routinely, we would gather information about the bizarre happenings around us (i.e. deaths in the family, illnesses of our classmates, wierd sightings in the night, further conformation that Satan was fighting us) and off of that, we tried together to write a novel. He was actually a Final Fantasy junkie who was writing his own Medieval tale, so he left the actual wrtiting of this scary story to me. I remember putting about 50 pages into our computer, deleting, writing more, cursing, crying, and then coming to the conclusion that I was not cut out for this. See, I truly thought I was being haunted and we were really being chased by ghosts, and delving so far into that which was Sean was too much for even Sean to do.
Eleven was around the time the sickness had arrived. Had I known how many hours of therapy and self-examination were to come, I probably could have written a fucking War and Peace-esque story with no problem. I was a kid tho, and foresight was not in my vocabulary.
Over the years, however, I began to realize that the stuff that most people were responding well to were the personal stories. My stints in hospitals, my cross-country travels, my predilection toward people and places of the bizarre, gave me enough material to last the rest of my life. So most of it, in one way or another, will find its way in a book.
I bore you with this backstory so that you'll understand that while I realize I'm better at writing slighty skewed non-fiction...when one really sits down and revisits memories that have layers of dust from sitting in the closet too long, it puts one in a creative but interesting mood. With this new project that I am tackling, a good portion of it deals with the way my life was changing when I was 11. It was a horrible time for me (even without the supposed demons and ghosts.) I can pinpoint that as the year I went from being a child, to getting a depressing look at what life held in store for me. Childhood was over then, and the next ten or so years would be nothing but a series of tests. Most of which, I would fail miserably.

I'm totally going into this with mixed emotions and only hope that it makes for an interesting story when I'm done.