Beginning of a Lifeline
I was a thirteen year old in search of an identity. I was such a cookie-cutter nineties kid. Angsty, a little entitled, abrasive, charming and mostly full of shit. Sadly, little has changed except now I pay bills and my dog Max dictates what I am going to be doing all day. Anyway, I played sports, tried being a bully on for about two or three years around this time -- an awful but true fact about myself, and I think I was in trouble for a school fight or something. I fired up the dial-up and started combing around the adolescent pages of AOL. After being kicked out of chat rooms, booted offline about half a dozen times I got the distinct impression from my already annoyed parents that one more would be the last one. Behaving, I found a chat section titled Arts & Entertainment and stumbled across the world of online writing.
What. A. Mistake.
I tried mocking it, because that’s my default for almost everything out of my admittedly narrow comfort zone. A week later I was asking questions about it, finding out how to get involved; and it was amazing. I couldn’t reconcile with my creativity very well when I was a kid, I didn’t have a medium or outlet I really excelled at. Sadly that creativity only found use in lying, which I did frequently, a problem that plagued me into my adulthood. Still, this was the genesis of my writing. It was just such a good time -- you built a world and story on the fly with other great writers. It didn’t work out well every time but when it did? Unreal. One-off scene of two characters, maybe not even your own, clashing in some impossible fashion. Ever wondered what it would be like to have Neo from the Matrix have to battle it out with Superman? Too easy. The really great writers though breathed life into their own creations, worlds, and blueprinted out such massive and immersive worlds for fellow writers to dive in and swim around awhile. My creative and business partner and I actually met through this venue, a pair of our own characters carrying on a story-building relationship for years.
I lost myself for hours there, and I am thankful for it. Some of the shit I was doing was dumb, so dumb even the invincibility of youth was having me rethink a lot of my decisions. This kept me home on a lot of nights that could have turned out real bad, though because I was a fairly popular kid and somebody that was a slave to social status, I actually hid this writing hobby of mine like some kind of shameful mistress. Not sure why, though, half the characters in the book are not only based off people whom I met online but quite literally named them after. These are some of the best and truest friendships I’ve had, will have and ever heard of. There’s a very strange kind of vulnerability in building a story together, we’re using pieces that are of our own broken being, shards of us brought back together by an imaginary vessel -- and when we did that, they stood across equally flawed characters that were built upon the heartbreak and insecurity of someone else.
My best friend Patrick Marinazzo was the only guy who knew about this second world online I shared for the first... Hell, decade I was in it. We lived together from end of high school till well into our adulthood. Even when both of us started making respectable money and almost respectable decisions we opted to live together. Patrick knew writing kept me sane. We had so many four-and-five-A.M. nights-to-mornings where we kicked back Mountain Dew in our early teens and beer not soon after, laughed and listened to music while he jammed out on an Xbox and I wrote. Cheering and howling at my laptop screen with every fun twist and turn me and my tribe made for each other. Patrick didn’t just listen, he LISTENED, and knew about my stories and even asked how they’d been progressing and what was happening. Even if he didn’t care all that much, he cared enough about me to let me shake out some of that static excitement that came with ending an excellent scene with someone else.
Patrick was my confidant, and really the guy who was my biggest fan. If he’d lived to see the release of this book he’d have bought ten behind my back even if he could have only afforded one. I dedicated my first book to him, which was probably shitty because this one will be rife with newbie mistakes. It was his incessant chiding me to follow through with this that really got me to search out how to go about putting together my own novel, and even in his passing it’s the fact that he would have never let me hear the end of it that kept me forging through the entire process to bring this story to the light of day.
If Patrick was my foundation, my base, my mom Deborah Davis was the fuel to keep that fire driving. Deborah is a no-bullshit, zero nonsense kind of woman when it comes to work. She’s both the toughest and kindest woman I know, and her belief, encouragement and constant spurring is really where this finally took form. After I wrote this, for a therapeutic exercise of all things, I showed it to her. She’s a voracious reader and just kept bugging me about more pages, telling me to follow through with this, don’t drop it halfway and don’t sleep on my own talent. It was her seal of approval that really brought me out of the dark with this.
So there I was, starting to get some traction on this when BOOM, my amazing mother gave me a book. The Hobbit. She and I have always been incredible close and she’s actually my step-mom, so she’s more of a hostage to my insane family more than anything else. So we decided to do a mother-son thing by going and seeing the upcoming Lord of the Rings film, for which she recommended I actually read them beforehand. The Hobbit was the first real book I cracked open; after that I was voracious, just chewing through that whole series, anything to do with it, then moved on to the Forgotten Realms and R.A. Salvatore. Before, I was flirting with it, but after a nudge by my mother I was just… hooked.
Anyway, so back to my writing. I joined the military, and during that seven years I kept at the writing. I had narrowed down my writing partners, and all of them are in a class of their own brilliance; in fact, once they see getting a book is published I hope they’ll all follow suit and drive me back out of the business I’ve just stepped into. They’re amazing. My friend Kitt and I not only played characters off one another, but crafted our own world, created a conjoining lore to it that we also collaborated on. I mean an entire world, and a good one, too. Casey, who is basically an older sister type, helped me look beyond just character, layers, and depth, she showed me how to push stories and encompass so much, tying it all together. Justin was just a rival and while it grew to be much more, an unabashed rival wasn’t such a bad thing back then. Chris the Lizard, the big guy who made it all so much fun. Jamie who could always keep me guessing and had the most poetic eloquence, there’s a lot. Frank, Aisha, Jason (you twerp), Anthony (an actual twerp), Dan, Keith, Matt, I mean if I kept going it would look like I was just writing random names. I borrowed from each of them, in truth I am really an amalgamation of all these wonderful people who helped give a voice to the crazy-train thought process rattling around in my head.
I got out of the military, and right before I broke my neck (literally), I had a therapist ask me about my story. I was processing a lot, dealing with the first inkling of PTSD, anxiety and some other stuff, and they thought because I had a way of evading any serious stuff this might help. I defaulted to what I knew best and just spun it as a quick, twelve-page bullshit thing. The guy seemed to genuinely like it, and because I am nothing if not innovative (see: lazy), I turned that very thing in for a school project. I broke my neck, lost my military career, my left arm stopped working, then dealt with a lot of other stuff for many years before thankfully recovering and I thought I had shit. Ended up that wasn’t the case -- one of my professors at a small school thought I could be a writer and that I had a worthwhile story.
Lo and bold this would be the beginning of a lifeline. I wrote half this book, and I showed it to my mother, who, being full of moxie, wasn’t going to feed me any bullshit -- she liked it. I brought it to the woman I know read most, Karla, and she thought there was something there. Between them I had my first editor, people who could speak Lawrence.
Let me tell you something, get an editor that understands you if you’re really unconventional, don’t listen to any advice from anybody else until your first draft is done and they put it together. If you’re going to do this, do it on your merit, your voice, there is nothing wrong with someone helping to smooth it out and give it shape, but don’t substitute you in it. Mom and Karla did that for me.
From there I got my first copy, and doing exactly what people told me not to, I showed it to some people I trusted for real feedback. My old LT and a painfully handsome man (who can cook and is single) Joseph Janke. He was my first reveal outside people who I thought kind of had to give the thing a real look, and instead of some empty platitude of ‘cool’ or whatever, he broke it all down, said what he liked and didn’t, gave pointers and told me to drive on. Priscilla, the most raw real giver out there, did the same and with the kind of people who brought out the best in me giving me the building blocks I needed to put this together I was off.
Luck be a woman I’ve yet to scorn, because a dear friend of mine Jason Harrington just happened to know a guy. Jason, shocked I could read let alone write, asked if I was serious and tapped the friend of his to see if he’d take a look. He did. He did, while freely admitting it wasn’t his thing, he thought it had teeth.
Usually I would be thankful but not impressed, being as I figured Jason couldn’t read either and whoever his author friend was I just assumed was some kind of contributor for a nudie magazine.
Nope. Guy ended up being a real and accomplished author, an author who actually agreed to take me under his wing. That evolved into actually being given an opportunity to be published by him and his organization. Not just published, but one of their first published in this genre.
I’m lucky, almost criminally so, and really while this kind of morphed from a how I got into writing to something else, that’s really the thought track of it.