Kelley invited me to be a regular blogger for the RMFW blog. I figure I ought to introduce myself, which I don’t want to do, because that’s boring. So instead I figure I’ll tell you some of the stuff I nerd out about. I’ll keep it writing-related. I can respect a theme.

Writers I Admire

• John le Carré – If your dad was a conman who involved you in his grifts from a young age, what can you do except join the British Secret Service? John Cornwall, writing under John le Carré, attacked social norms with his books. Some of his most favorite bugbears were James Bond, “the Man”, and the fabric of truth in story itself. My favorite book of his is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is the story of how James Bond is probably working for the Russians and how endings are lies.
• China Miéville – Every book by China feels like it was written by a different but equally skilled writer. I hesitate to pick up any of them because the premise of each of them sounds too weird for me. It turns out that’s a flaw in marketing. They are weird, but he’s skilled enough to deal with that. My favorite book by him is The City and the City, a story about two cities that occupy the same patch of land and it’s illegal to perceive one of them from the other one.
• Natasha Pulley – I’m pretty sure Natasha lives in another, slightly more magical universe, and she sends her books over here to get published. They’re slightly magical historical novels, but they’re written with the sort of emotional verisimilitude that feels like an extended skin. My favorite of hers is The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, the story of two people figuring out how to date in the late 1800s.
• Tim Powers – Tim likes to find obscure headlines or odd details of history without full explanations and say, “well, it was obviously genies,” or something like that. I don’t have a favorite book of his—I’ve enjoyed all of them I’ve encountered. I have reread Last Call a few times. It’s about the hazards of playing poker with tarot cards.
• Chuck Palahniuk – The ultimate cliche of people bucking against cliche, right? I just like how weird and yet effective his writing is. Speaks to me on a level I don’t want to explain, because that would sort of ruin it. No favorite single book of his. I’ve liked all of them. Survivor, so far, has stood out a bit. Can’t say why. Because if I did, the ghost of Chuck would sneak up on me an give me a mean side-eye, which would be a clever trick since he’s not dead.

Writing Tricks/Lessons I Use Almost Every Day (but not favorite ones because I find that word misleading)

• From Yojimbo, the Akira Kurosawa film: writing is like being a samurai—once you decide what to do, then do it! And nobody has to understand what you’re doing except you. And your only responsibility at that point is working as hard as you can to do the best that you can.
• From David Sedaris – Small talk sucks, and (unrelated) writers are fortunate because we have a constructive use for our pain. Also, making people laugh is all well and good, but it’s trite unless you can also make them cry.
• From Keith Richards – All songs are pretty much about love.
• From Gene Wolfe – You never learn how to write a book. You only learn how to write the next one.
• From Audrey Hepburn – Live hard, but do so with so much poise that nobody would suspect that you spied on the Nazis during World War II.

There’s a lot of other stuff I use every day, but that’s what I can remember.

Areas of Interest That Will No Doubt Come Up

This is some of what I can (and will) nerd out about, so it will come up in what I blog about in the future.

• Music
• Digital marketing – It’s my day job. I think about it a lot, especially how much it has to do with the history of espionage.
• History – Lots of good stories in history. The way I like to retort when people say peevish and triggering things is to bury myself in the historical background of the subject for a few weeks until they’ve forgotten they said it, and I’m still totally fuming about it but I now know exactly why it bothered me that time my little brother kept calling people communists as a joke.
• Physics – Especially astrophysics, particle physics, and quantum mechanics. I will never claim understanding of them, but I find them beautiful. I tend to find a lot of writing lessons in physics.
• Bushido – I got kicked out of seminary, which is the beginning of a story with a lot of salient points, chief of which for the blogs I’ll write for RMFW is that I have enough philosophy in me to convince me I don’t want any more. I also have enough that I see its use and what to do with it. At seminary, I studied a lot of Western philosophy—Aristotle and Descartes and guys like that. What they had to say felt like it often stopped right before answering, “Okay, cool thought, dude—but what do I do with that?” I find a lot of those answers in Eastern philosophy. So I nerd out about both sometimes.
• Story construction – Unsurprising, maybe, for a blog on the website of an organization called Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. I have recently earned a degree in English, though, so all the literary theory I can choke on is top-of-mind just now.

Like anyone, I’m not reducible to three or four pieces of trivia, but those have been floating at the surface of late.

Land-Locked Viking Metalhead Writer

Those are a few of my motivators.

I’m big into the entire pretense of RMFW as well. I love the idea of writers supporting writers. I love watching writer friends thrive. I mention this because you folks are those writer friends, and I would love hearing from you about your victories, your trials, and all the mundane stuff in between that goes on in your growing careers.

Glad to meet you. I hope to be a valuable contributor to your RMFW blog-reading experience.