User Profile

The short version:
Eeking out an existence in the midwest. Pursuing far too many hobbies at one time: playing in a band, writing, building sculpture, drag racing, photography, drawing and on and on. I'm currently trying to figure out which one should be a vocation, and how to prioritize all the rest of it. Right now I spend a lot of time being tired after doing all of it in the space of a week or two. I have a love for the creative side of life, and a good amount of frustration at not being able to devote another 40 hours of my life to said creative side. It occurs to me that the day job sure does suck up a lot of time that could be spent doing *important* things!

The slightly longer version:
- I took part in NaNoWriMo in 2008 for the first time, and I hit my word count, but had not finished the novel even at 76K words. It took seven months for me to write just 16K more and finish it. Slow, but finished! This year I took part in NaNo again and wrote the entire 64K-word novel, completed from beginning to end, and I had a whole day to spare! Apparently, I'm learning brevity, if nothing else. That makes two completed novels in two years. I think this second one may get some follow-up attention, see if any agent is crazy enough to take it on.
- In 2007 a friend and I got on our motorcycles and rode from Indiana to the Bonneville salt flats in Utah and raced our bikes. It was one of the single greatest adventures I've ever had in my life.
- I love dystopian literature. It's been a recent discovery for me, and I've dived into it with abandon. I have read 1984, We, Player Piano, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Feed, and I'm currently reading 334 by Thomas M. Disch. I have a list of over sixty of these types of books, and I want to read every single one on the list.
- I like weird speculative fiction. Not all of it dark, but the dark adds to the fun. Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont are two of my favorite writers. They wrote for the Twilight Zone as well as doing novel and short story work, among other things. Beaumont died far too early for his gifts to be fully recognized. He is still acknowledged as one of the greatest modern writers of fiction by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Dean Koontz.
- I discovered last year that I have a love for kinetic sculpture, specifically rolling ball sculpture. I've built two complete ones, and am in the process on a third. It causes me some amount of nagging mental distress (like when you can't reach that spot in the middle of your back to itch it) when I don't have proper time to invest in working on them. It's really weird, because I just found out about them, and now I'm really taken up with the whole thing. If you're ever in Indianapolis, Indiana, and you're of a mind for these things, go to the Children's Museum there. They have a really large one that runs with billiard balls. It's awesome. I'd like to build one that's mounted to the ceiling of my house and runs through every single room of it. Seriously. It's almost like watching fish swim or something.
- I play in a band. I've been doing that since college. I've now been in the same band for a dozen years or so. Lately the conflicts between time demands with the band and my other interests have been showing up, and that's been unfortunate. I never expected that I was going to want to do other things as much or possibly more than playing in the band.

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