A History of My Writing Habit

A Brief History of my Writing Journey, Internet Fame’ishness, etc

I began writing in the laundry room of my childhood home. Our freezer happened to be in a line with the washer and dryer. There was about one foot of space between the freezer and the wall. Just big enough for a kid to squeeze behind. There was only about six inches between the dryer and the wall, so you could put an entire shoulder blade on that and basically have a chair.

The freezer hummed. The dryer hummed. Rest your head where the two joined together and it drowned out the world. To me, that was heaven.

Time is funny for everyone, especially kids. These occasions are among my earliest memories. Ten minutes can feel like ten hours at that age. A full hour can be an eternity. But I know that I spent at least two or three hours a day in that spot because I could time it based on what was on the television in the living room.

When my mother gave me a package of yellow legal pads and my grandfather gave me a box of pencils, that I swear were cedar, that was all I needed for that spot to basically become a portal to Narnia. Even before I could write, I scribbled little pictures. Some giant mess that could have been titled “The story of this line being scribbled all over the page.” I may have been there physically for a few hours at a time, but mentally I was off having all kinds of adventures and those could last entire lifetimes. Anything happening anywhere else in the house was someone else’s concern.

Later, when we got an L-shaped couch I did something similar. You could throw a few pillows on top of yourself and hide in the corner behind the rounded L-shape. Nobody would bother you there, nobody ever looked there, and you could write all day if that’s what you wanted. Which I did. At one point, I even wrote in a laundry hamper with some dirty towels thrown on top of me.

I associate writing with secrecy and concealment. I still can’t write a single word if someone is watching me. Somehow putting my own name on it does the same thing. I might as well be trying to go to the bathroom in front of all my professional acquaintances. If someone I knew and saw everyday read my stuff regularly? Forget about it.

When I was in grade school, I won a few competitions for writing but I’m fuzzy on the details. You would think that it would have meant more to me, but I resented having to share at first. It felt like having to walk naked in front of people and then have them nonchalantly comment, “hey, nice penis.” I know that I had some stories in the school newspaper, which happened because I was the editor —some teacher or other walked up to me one day and told me that I had to be the editor— and Mrs. Hancock said we had to use at least four pages and we only ever had two and a half. Which goes to show you how far someone will go to make word count. By junior high, other kids were passing around my sketchbooks and short stories and I quite liked that as all of those stories were about wizards or knights or things like that. At some point I had several reams of printer paper covered in character drawings for my various worlds.

Outside of my own judgement of myself, I always considered those the truest tests. Do you have to ask someone to read your stuff or do they ask to do it on their own? Do you have to ask them to spread it around or do they do it on their own? Once they start, how quickly do they read?

My private test is, how scared did you feel while writing that? Do you feel like you ripped anything out of your chest to give to someone else? Does it hang of a piece? Is it worthy?

The one time I wrote a slightly biographical story in junior high for an assignment, Mrs. Lewis sent me to the school counselor and from then on I knew not to do that again.

In high school, I started work on what I figured would be my magnum opus, one of those giant several thousand page long Fantasy series. I wanted to write my version of The Dark Tower or The Wheel of Time. The story had been with me since those days behind the freezer and I wanted to get it out. I really don’t know how I found the time, but I made up something like eight languages for it, several hundred pages of history, and every time I hit about one-hundred thousand words I would stall out and get too scared to finish. I still haven’t finished it. Maybe there will be time when I retire. I remember I won a few essay contests and something like a hundred dollars in government bonds, which were promptly stolen by the kids of my dad’s latest girlfriend. I think they thought it was cash and probably threw it way when they realized they couldn’t spend it.

College was the first time I had a writing career, if you could call it that. Looking back, I’m pretty embarrassed about the whole thing now, and at the same time don’t know how it could have gone much differently. I had no idea how to exist outside of the context of my family needing me all the time. I felt like a lion that had been raised in captivity, too afraid to leave its cage when someone opened the door. Or some deep sea fish caught in a net and brought to the surface, only for my organs to explode from the pressure differential. I started posting way too much on message boards, probably similarly to how I post way too much on substack Notes. I behaved obnoxiously, if in an entertaining manner… again, like I do on substack Notes. But with even less restraint, if you can believe such a thing. I was funny, though.

A popular blogger offered me a writing gig at a new company he was launching.

I was twenty-one and really shouldn’t have done this, but I wrote a ton of stories about my family. Except without the long bits where I look back and see it all differently because I was only a few years away from it all at that point. And people definitely noticed. The site started out with three writers, but eventually no one else could keep up with my output and they stopped producing new work. There were a few hundred thousand readers at one point. Which made, and this is critical, absolutely no difference in my every day life. I’d always thought it would, but it definitely didn’t except maybe slightly for the worse.

Everyone at the sawmill found out and they printed out copies in the front office to pass them around in the lunchrooms. One of my high school buddies must have found it at college, as that was where pretty much all my readers were at that point. My guess is it got shared with someone’s dad and then it went around. My mom temporarily disowned me, which I found to be a bit of a relief apart from not being able to see my younger brother and sister for a while.

Looking back on it now, I was clearly quite angry about my childhood and looking to get even. I’ve got copies of it. Every word drips with bitterness before my now middle-aged eyes. The cruel ravings of an angry child. Funny, still, but not the kind of funny I enjoy as a near forty year old man.

My dad could not have cared less. The internet is still a fake place to him, which is probably healthy. He still doesn’t really care except that the occasional woman with giant boobs don’t try to find ways to contact me on the internet anymore.

Like I said, I find a lot of it juvenile and embarrassing now. Really, really embarrassing. Especially if I’m honest with myself about my primary motivation. Despite rarely leaving my apartment or school, I liked the attention. And I liked all of that stuff not being secret anymore. I thought of myself as unique, which was my way of making sure I never connected with anyone. It also helped support my growing agoraphobia. It was a lot easier to “connect” to people on the internet than in real life. Real intimacy is terrifying and internet intimacy is easy and as easily traded as some cheap commodity. It’s like eating rabbits in a wilderness survival scenario, though. You can starve even if you’re eating a thousand rabbits a day.

Shortly after this all started, I had my first adult panic attack. Sitting in a crowded lecture hall, it suddenly felt like everyone was on top of me, the way that crabs crawl over one another on the bottom of the ocean. During the middle of the class, I pushed my way out, ran to the side exit, and immediately threw up in a garbage can. When the professor came to check on me, I couldn’t speak and stumbled away. I think he thought I was drunk. I had to run to some nearly empty part of the campus to catch my breath. Critically, I had absolutely no idea what had happened, or why, and made zero attempts to acknowledge it or talk to someone about it. Multiple people tried to help me and I pushed it all away as hard as I could.

I was fine, I told myself. Lots of people randomly start to feel like they’re being buried alive when they’re in public. Sure.

You never really get famous for writing on the internet, but you can get “fame-ish.” People send you long letters about how much they love you. Sometimes scarily long letters about how much they love you. Strangers gush about how great you are in random reddit and comment threads. You pick up a couple of stalkers and it gets to your head. It makes you forget that you’re a real person, with real-life obligations, subject to the same boring rules as everyone else, instead of a character in a story that you are also writing. Real life began to take on the flavor of fiction in unhealthy ways.

The mask you wear, even if that mask is a caricature of your real life, wears you. You start to fit into it like a mold. I sold myself as a lovable loser weirdo who would never have anything go right. And that’s what I became. Over time, I hated it.

This is all a chapter of my life that would have gone a lot smoother if I had simply taken anyone up on the innumerable offers of help that they extended to me. I was blind and deaf to all of them. Including a shitty ghosting of my sort-of long-distance girlfriend who was an absurdly attractive television news anchor. Oh, she was a lovely person as well. I bring it up only because if you had any idea of the attractiveness delta in that relationship you would say, “yeah, man, no ones writing is that good.” It took something close to a month and multiple pieces of evidence to realize she was a real person and the reason she was interested in me was my writing. Couldn’t have been nicer. And I was super, super flaky and shitty.

I realize some of my last few pieces contain what probably read like humblebrags. I promise I cringe a bit even as I jot them down. Like that last bit, I type it while muttering “what an unbelievable piece of shit.” I was not a good friend to anyone during that part of my life. In my middle years, I’ve tried to find the middle way to discuss things. To speak with neither false humility or false bravado. I knew that I had a talent for writing, even then, but it lived and still lives in a different part of my brain, like an alter ego. If you asked me if I was a writer during regular working hours I could say no and still pass a lie-detector test.

It was a weird level of fame for a college kid to have at that time. Although I imagine with social media it’s much more common. There were a few people who approached me for autographs when I was walking around campus. Someone would get super excited that I was that one guy on the internet whose blog made them laugh, and whose every intimate experience was right there for the world to read, and I would have to stand there in terror as they searched for a pen. That was the only time the horror of having exposed my every personal formative life experience ever sank in. The stories were decently popular but it was hard to gauge how popular in real terms. Most writing success seems fake even when it’s “real.”

For instance, I’m pretty sure Bill Nye the Science Guy once stole an anecdote about my life and used it in a debate about young Earth creationism and attributed it to “the internet.” I know this wasn’t some weirdo schizophrenic thing because about two dozen other people contacted me about it right after it happened. All the while, I hardly ever left my apartment and had no friends in real life.

I also, as it turned out, was not actually making any money from doing this the way I thought I was. I have lots of theories as to why, ego and bravado mostly, but basically the company had never figured out how to monetize. As I was being paid a share of the profits, it turned out that several months of work was worth about a hundred dollars.

I had foregone a work study job in order to focus on writing and this meant I was completely broke.

There were other relatively famous people in the same blogging network and I had the most popular site by a fairly wide margin. I used that to tell myself that all the red flags were hiccups and it all had to be legitimate, because hey, I was in the same blogging network as the guy who starred in The Mask 2 and I had more traffic than him. I’d had modest hopes that I would bring home a few thousand dollars every six months. That plus my scholarships would pay for school. It was not to be. I wound up dropping out, which again, is entirely my fault. There were lots of things I could have done to stay in school, including loans, but I was too proud. And it was so easy to shrug and just not have to be around all those people anymore.

Needless to say, I quit that job.

This was my first exposure to the financial realities of writing as a career and it settled into my bones. From that day forward, I knew never to count on making any money from my writing. I started doing random construction work under the table instead.

This was all very dramatic at the time. If I could go back and give myself advice on what to do, I wouldn’t even have focused on this part of my life. I would probably give myself a bunch of advice on how to handle my school career and seeking a therapist instead. Then before jumping back to the future I would say “oh yeah, don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the writing stuff. Do it as a hobby, but it matters way less than you think it does.”

I had a solo blog for a few years, which was slightly less popular but much more fun. I did a lot more science fiction and fantasy stuff, like I’d always wanted. Some people even insisted that the film series The Purge was ripped off from one of my stories, but I am still of two minds on that. It was fun to have something go viral and know, quietly and to myself, that George RR Martin had liked one of my essays. Or that some minor internet celebrity thought I wrote good stuff. Or, strangely, to see some show steal one of my jokes. Which, again, always made me feel crazy until it happened several times.

At one point, I wrote a screenplay for a comedy about a summer camp for handicapped kids getting into a prank war with a camp for rich kids and almost sold it to the company that produced American Pie. Which would have been real money. Almost.

That’s pretty much how it went. A lot of “almosts” or “that’s neat” and a mountain of “not quites.” There I was, still eating rabbits, looking for nourishment. A lot of this can be laid at my feet as well, as I considered myself too good to submit to any venues and waited for people to come to me instead. This did actually happen a couple of times, but again, I managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I kept noticing my normal life wasn’t that great. I had no friends. I was slaving away in a call center to keep my mother’s life afloat. My personal life existed entirely on the internet. I’d given no thought at all to my own future. I kept thinking of the way my mom would throw away our lives at home to focus on Karaoke and it would make me sick. It still does. I’d think things like “but my mom never almost sold a movie! My mom never had her jokes stolen on a tv show!” But then I’d think of the way she’d come home from Karaoke and talk about why she was so different from all the other people there, who were purely deluded. And how people came up to her to say that she was great the same way that people came up to me to say that I was great. I came to think of writing in the same way. I decided, after a painful long while, to give it up.

Except, of course, I need to write the same way that I need to go to the bathroom. And I do think of it that way. Writing is like going to the bathroom. If I don’t find a place to do it, and take care of it there, it’s going to come out of me in other ways and at others times when it isn’t appropriate. I still wrote several thousand words a month during the periods where I would have described myself as having “totally quit.” I’d look someone dead in the eye and say “I haven’t written anything in years… apart from these twelve novellas.” I wrote and published solely to my google drive.

Several years later, I changed my pen name and posted some horror stories on reddit. A whole different genre. I was with my now wife by then, more mature, fully grown. I wasn’t so much a search for intimacy as it was a desire to see if I could still do it. Like a gunslinger who has to put on his belt one last time, I wanted to know if I was still as good as I thought. I’d shed my old internet fame and would have to stand on my own merits for what I could do at that specific time. It was the first story I’d let out of my google drive in a long while. It was based on a terrible nightmare that had taken my breath away upon waking.

The first of those stories made it to the front page of reddit, which is quite difficult for anything but especially a short story. It didn’t excite me so much as it made me feel validated. It calmed me. My talent wasn’t completely delusional. I managed the same feat a few months later. Another sign that this wasn’t all completely like my mom talking about how she was going to find an agent at Karaoke night. A podcast picked up those stories and there are a few people in the world with tattoos themed after that work now. Which is awesome and horrifying. A few YouTube channels with a couple hundred thousand views is nice, too. A celebrity from my childhood even read one of them! Also, one time one of those stories went viral in India and everyone thought it was real in the comments and I felt very badly.

There’s not much money in short stories. There just isn’t. Maybe that’s different now with substack, but I don’t know. There’s lots of stuff I could have done differently to make money and eke out a living. Probably stuff I could still do. Maybe I could have chased after Hollywood dollars and tried harder to option a few of my stories for television episodes but that seemed like a whole other job and I didn’t know how to get started. I’m not a salesperson by nature. I’m like a beaver who only wants to build a dam, and doesn’t really care about all the other parts of it.

I felt myself getting drawn into it at the same time my regular, boring real-life career was taking off and so I decided to cut it off again. You don’t want to come across your boss’ super weird horror stories about Hitler’s brain being put into a cow’s body. I didn’t and still don’t want it to become my version of Karaoke night, where I emotionally abandon my family to pretend I am the next Jodi Mitchell. Just post, change your name, post somewhere else. Every time you start to garner attention again, that’s validation you have a skill. Then move on. That keeps you free.

A few years after that I won $1,500 in a contest for a story, which paid for my son’s hospital delivery bill. Still, making a few hundred dollars was nothing to having a regular career. It’s way better to be a boring guy with a laptop job than a minor internet celebrity who is always worried about money.

This is still, mostly, the way I feel about writing, even after catching a bit of traction here. A bit of traction, I’m not delusional. It’s a hobby. A release. But it’s not something to let eat your whole life. Then again, my experience has been that most writing careers are completely fake until they are totally real. Probably there is some world somewhere and I figured out the selling and pitching part of it and I’m making a living from writing over there. That world isn’t this one.

I want to stress I couldn’t be more happy how this worked out, even for all the bumps in the road. Writing isn’t my whole life. I jumped over so many important things in this telling. I have a wife and child I love. I don’t want a different wife and child which is what it would mean to want a different life. I want the ones I currently have, and any road that led me to them was the best possible road. And I thank God for that.