Absinthe Can Wait

I have little time or money. Had I an excess of either, I am sure that I would exercise my freedoms in excessive libations. These days, though, I am quite sober and my independent creative moments are spent in a hunch-backed fever, punching words into a keyboard or scribbling into a notebook resting on my knee. It was my plan, by this time this year, to have income enough and the open schedule to spend a handful of notable hours in blissful inebriation, experiencing the fall colors of the rural northeast with dazzling false intensity. I smoke the occasional dry cigar until I’m dizzy, but there isn’t room to drink.

Instead, I mostly scribble on the train, the bus, during lunch, and at night, when I walk from here to there and on the way I have to stop and sit down and write in my notebook on my knee. There are so few moments to squeeze in the story that I practice my personal craft of piezochronosyngraphophilia, letting the sleepless hours stack up so that I might translate the deepening lines under my eyes into published lines in a magazine or book.

Even when I go to get a drink, when I plot a trip to the building where the vending machines are, the whole way lost in a thought, I arrive to find I haven’t enough change to acquire the mixer for a beverage. So I think to myself that tonight is instead another night for writing. The ideas rise so I sit and put down two more pages in the notebook before returning home to punch them into the word processor.

It was supposed to be so poetical, drinking in the autumn sun like mead running sideways through the red and yellow trees. But maybe the harsher reality is the more poetic. Shucking the useless things from the routine until all that’s left is work and poetry. Work by day, poetry by night. It’s making the night last and last that might make them memorable and bright as lit liquor.

Writing, Squeezing Time

In what felt like a brief moment of subject clarity, I scribbled a whole six front and back pages on my small notebook during the train ride this morning, writing the very last words moments before the final bell rang and the doors closed, which would have sent me racing to Manhattan instead of pacing to my occupation in Hoboken. Writers live for those closing moments of a thought, pushing the pen faster as the mind revs for the finish, extending time, even if just briefly, through the pursuit of a beloved activity. The essay, my personal retrospective on Bill Bryson, will appear here.

It still rains on the staircase

Tonight I stood under a staircase to get out of the rain, and showered ideas down, wetting page after page of a notebook the size of my palm. I thought it a romantic, singular moment, a loose pen slathering the page while the lights and sounds around me spoke of the artificial environment of the contemporary world. I pleaded with the universe for moments enough to record my flooding feelings, before I had to hide my notebook from the freezing drips and chase down a car.

My thought, seemingly completed, yet ran from the spigot the next day.

A writer and his tired pens

The pens of a writer, the poor utensils of a quiet trade that are yet tools scratched down to parched nibs of metal. This old-fashioned scribe persists in filling pads and margins with notes and lists and whole essays inked and carved into the paper by the work of a flowing wrist. On trains and take-out restaurant counters, standing up and sitting down, in the final moments before the last lamp burst, the writer clutches his little notebooks and fills them with tracts of human thought. The regal fountain pen, steel-nibbed and bleeding black paint onto the page; the opulent felt tip, gliding over pulp like a rower’s craft on still river water; the working-class ball point, its tiny bit of brass tirelessly treading through thousands of loops and dashes and dots and strikethroughs and underlines.

And I have exhausted them all. The pliant, sweeping edge of the fountain pen, once the source of all ink stains, is condemned to be but a shiny, oily glint on the writer’s desk. The second-in-command, a fat pen with silky ink and rubbery grip in the fingers, writes in faint gray lines as if transmitting the dying words of an ancient ghost. Saddest is the ball point, the would-be hero that faded too quickly to receive the glories of Valhalla. He was conveyed to the black river Styx in the belly of a waste basket, endowed for his terrible silent and eternal rest.

As my own quartermaster general, I strip the life-blood from my fallen pens’ fellow, a foundling blue pen without grace or gravitas, to write an order for additional troops and troop supplies. The fountain will see further action, once nursed back to health with an injection of rich black blood. His fat cousin may even be called upon again; if not, some brother may be summoned. A rear regiment of ball points awaits orders that, God willing, shall never come.

In six weeks, I have driven three pens to beyond the brink. Such is my life as a writer.

My History as a Writer

I was thinking about what I have done as a writer. Although my name hasn't appeared in too many, or in too great of publications, I have spent a tremendous portion of my life writing...

I have been writing creatively and independently since I was a small child. My first book was completed when I was in the fourth grade. The Red Cross Knight, a children’s adventure book about a warrior on a long-distance quest, was exquisitely illustrated by a friend from my class. One year later, I dramatized Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for my fifth grade class play. Fortunately, it was not performed.

Throughout middle school I was highly prolific, writing three novellas, many lengthy short stories, and two unfinished but extensive novels. In high school I collected my poems—written on small pieces of paper and kept in my pocket, sometimes at the rate of ten or more a day—into a book titled Orange Moon. I also kept, for some time, a diary chronicling the life of a fictional person.

After high school, I wrote movie scripts, both original and adapted from novels, and personal essays. Once entering college, I immediately joined the newspaper and within one semester was a senior writer and assistant section editor. At Rice University, I took Dramatic Writing four times and wrote several one-act plays and a handful of shorts.

After college, I wrote a cookbook and became a freelance writer for the Web. Currently I am a staff writer and Web content manager for a university communications office, every week producing thousands of words of original content as well as narrative and promotional videos.

I continue to write personal essays, long-form non-fiction, drama for stage and screen, new dictionary definitions, and freelance Web content.

Become a better writer: write until you’re bored

Performance improves through practice. It’s as true in the art of writing as it is in sports, plumbing, or knot tying. The act of writing, however, often does not provide an author the immediate feedback inherent in other activities.

Working alone, the author has only his own mind as challenger and referee. The performance of his pen, the dictate of whether or nor what is written is good writing, relies on the discerning brain of this solitary, self-reflexive editor. How can one learn to write well if one’s constant companion is no better than oneself, and that companion tends to sympathize with the author’s verbal spewing.

I have found that the practice of writing often, writing tens of thousands of words and hundreds of little pieces and long pieces and existentially sublimated pieces and poetry and definitions and diary entries; all this—rather than incrementally sharpen some quillish intellect to producer ever crisper, neater, and more original prose—simply tires me of my clichés until I am so bored of my own voice that I have to make drastic changes in my style of composition simply to bear the sight of my assemblies of words.


From time to time, I will fall to this sad state. I will write on a notepad or in a journal and furiously negate line after line of horrible, hackneyed text. I become so bored with myself that I write cliché on purpose, unable to accept that I could do better or that I could be so terrible.

Yet I persevere. To overcome this disgust I reinvent my voice and style in some way that allows me to once again find some interest or value in the phrases self-provoked. And, as a writer, some kind of writer, I survive to set down another page.

I believe that most real change occurs only when painful frustration erupts out of some sort of crisis. Break-ups happen when one lover can no longer handle the miserable faction within the relationship. An auto manufacturer finally addresses latent safety issues when millions of recalled cars cost the company billions. Revolutions occur when the unbearable and sickening weight of oppression transforms into a moment when the insurmountable suddenly becomes the goal.

So I eagerly await the next crisis in my writing, knowing that whenever my eyes roll and I sigh and scream at the sight of my words, shortly thereafter I will be a new and far better writer.