Is this thing on?

It’s been an interesting couple of months that you haven’t heard about here. The previous post/transcribed conversation came with uncanny timing, just when the tectonic plates in my head were pressing hardest against one another and I was looking for any excuse to erupt with some petty, petty steam about Why We Write. Last fall, literally twice in one day, I had essentially this conversation:

“You really should write.”

“What?”

“You have a unique voice that I really enjoy; it would be great if you wrote.”

“I don’t underst- I do write. I write all the time.”

“No, man. Like, I would love to open up a newspaper every day and see you as a columnist, just offering up your skewed take on whatever is going on in the world. That is where your talent lies.”

“Fine, but I do exactly that all week long. I’ve had a web site for this express purpose since 1997. You could be doing this reading you’d like to do right now; your dreams are realized. I’ve known you for about eleven, twelve years now; ever pop over to jimski.net?”

“What? No, I don’t read your little ‘blog’. What am I, in junior high? I have a job.”

(I would still like to find the guy who invented “blog,” by the way, and taser him in the throat. He really kicked over my sandcastle.)

There comes a certain point at which one is just typing with no paper in the typewriter, talking into an unplugged phone. Feeling I had reached that point, I figured, “This is really time that could be better spent warping my child.” (She has to listen to me. She can’t reach the doorknobs.)

And yes, yes, “write for yourself,” whatever. I could spend a bunch of special me-time writing for myself. Then when I finish, I can go in the kitchen for an hour and craft an epic sandwich and then just cram it down the garbage disposal. I write lengthy essays full of bon mots “for myself” every day. I do this writing without paper; it is a genre I call “thinking.”

Then again, typing that just now felt good whether anyone sees it or not, so what the hell do I know about anything?

Anyway.

I was in the middle of my self-imposed fallow period (seeing the bookmark for my own site made me grimace) when a friend of mine cajoled me into taking a creative writing class, mostly because bringing me along meant she couldn’t chicken out and stop going unless she offered me a generous bribe to keep quiet about it. I liked the prospect of the bribe, but I was extremely apprehensive about the class; I pictured a room full of frustrated housewife poets and brain-damaged copywriters holding the shreds of my story, saying to the workshop, “I just didn’t, like, like it.” I also didn’t relish the prospect of having to evaluate their stories without everything ending in some kind of slap-fight. Worst of all, I hadn’t written fiction in an eternity, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t actually, strictly speaking, do it at all. I had been leaning of the crutch of wordy nonfiction for far too long. I was fairly certain this was going to be an atrocity against the language.

But miracles do happen: the class was small and full of bright people, and their stories were easy to praise. I was especially impressed with my friend’s work (although she is not currently challenging me in an output contest; peer pressure!) The criticism was almost all constructive, and I think I have abandoned some bad habits as a result of the time I spent there. It turns out, every once in a while, a second draft is beneficial. It also turns out that I like writing fiction after all these years a lot better than the other stuff; for one thing, there’s a lot less of your characters coming up to you with their eyes ablaze going, “That’s not the way it happened at all, you jerkoff.” You can just make them say whatever you want, and then throw them off a levee. I don’t know why I haven’t been doing this for years.

Of course, the class ended about a month ago and I haven’t written a line of fiction since. That does not mean, however, that I haven’t been writing. As a matter of fact, good people, I got myself a gig.

Well. I didn’t “get” a thing. That sounds like I went out and made something happen, instead of hearing a whistling noise from above and suddenly having a gig plummet into my lap, which is what actually occurred.

Quite, quite unexpectedly, I was offered a place at the table over at the web site iFanboy.com, where I now write a… column? article? “piece”?… once a week or more. iFanboy was a podcast I had been a fan of for many moons; being suddenly approached with this opportunity felt a lot like what I imagine it would feel like to be mugged by a leprechaun, just brained with a pot of gold.

And make no mistake, I am an idiot and gave a good twenty seconds of thought to fleeing from responsibility and turning the offer down before the last ball bearing of intelligence I have left rattling in my skull said, “Are you out of your goddamned me? This is exactly what you have been crabbing about. Audience! You write! They read! Should I draw you a chart? Gahh, so stupid.”

That was about four weeks ago, and while I think a couple of the columns I’ve written since then have come out pretty well I haven’t really talked about this gig with anybody I know. Outside the target audience of the site, I am not sure that what I’ve written is technically English. You sort of have to know a lot about Hellboys or who Grant Morrison is, and among my friends and family that accounts for about .00000031% of the population. Nevertheless, if people start hearing about this a year from now, it’s gonna look like I was holding out on everyone or living a secret life or something, so here’s what’s out there so far:

• The Handoff
  My first something something, about what happens when a new creative team takes the reins of a long ongoing story. Remember when Aaron Sorkin left West Wing, or they let the Gilmore Girls woman’s contract expire? It’s like that, but with unitards.
• Are Comic Book Movies Ruining Summer?
  A sort of point/counterpoint between me and fellow newbie Mike Romo about an Entertainment Weekly article that was so dimwitted I’m not even going to link to it.
• Requiem for Nu Marvel
  This is just me being nostalgic for the comics of my mid-twenties, and when I look at each of those words in the same sentence they combine into a perfect Voltron of sadness. And then the Voltron reference makes it that much sadder.
• Stack Week, Part One: The Shaming
  What is with the human impulse to buy a book you really want, set it down, and then buy another book without ever reading the first one? (Substitute DVDs, video games et al. as applicable.) I don’t know, exactly, but based on the full week of columns we did and the resulting comments, it is nearly universal behavior.

The funny thing is, now that I have made up that list, it occurs to me that 50% of my traffic is going to come from iFanboy just to see me telling them where they just came from. Sorry. This is all new to me. I’ll go back to posting baby pictures or whatever shortly.