The first thing I remember writing was in third-grade. We were told to write a story over the weekend… come Monday, everyone dutifully brought in a paragraph about their dogs or their little brothers, and I showed up with five pages of super-villain melodrama that was just coherent enough to excite grown-ups.
The next thing I remember was at… fifteen, I think? I wrote a Star Trek parody that was like Douglas Adams stripped of all wit and wisdom and reduced to relentless punnery and wacky wordplay. It ended up getting passed around the school, confiscated by the teachers, then read by all the teachers, and finally returned to me with an admonition to stop disrupting school.
I decided I wanted to Write Something at eighteen. I bought a stand-alone word processor —imagine a desktop computer than only runs one app, with a monitor and printer built into it— and wrote lots of crap. Almost entirely crap. I have 200 pages of a novel from that period, and it’s a clusterfuck of clashing themes and inconsistent pacing. But it does feature the first instance of romanticized violence in my writing: there’s a chapter in there about a prince and his new bride on their wedding night, wherein they banter back and forth, he declares his love for her, and then murders her with a knife. It’s a real mess.
At twenty-three, I wrote a BDSM-lite story for a girl who was way kinkier than I was prepared to be. She never read it, but I posted it online, which did two things: it served as an intro to a community of kinky people who became the biggest influence on my twenties, and it convinced a girl to call me “daddy” for the first time. It was very tame, but it got the job done.
And then something happened, right around then. I don’t know what it was; probably a number of mundane things. But I found another gear, and my writing became slightly more intricate. Perhaps it was the habit I developed —which persists to this day— of reading everything aloud as I’m writing it. (You don’t see much poetry around here because I have no rhythm, but I have an ear for how English should sound when spoken.)
Something shifted in my personality, too. Since my teens, I had been a combative contrarian… I took every opportunity to debate or stir up shit, and insisted on being Correct at all times. I was, in short, what half the internet would eventually become, minus the fascist and/or incel shit. Every interaction was a battle on some level, and I wanted to be five moves ahead.
And then one day it all suddenly seemed fruitless and tedious. People dreaded dealing with me —which is what a 25 year old man often thinks respect feels like— and really only tolerated me because I was funny. I wanted to be more than that, and I realized I wasn’t going to get there by beating people down with clubs made of logic. So I stopped trying.
Okay, really, it took five or six years to complete the transition, but I stopped trying to think my way around people and started thinking through them. I found that identifying with someone as much as I opposed him meant that I could do something more than win arguments… I could negate them. It turned out, not being a perpetual, gigantic asshole makes you more persuasive, not less. Go figure.
Anyhoo… whatever it was, it made a big difference. And then I promptly burned out. All fiction output ceased. I wrote a lot of (very conventional) kink essays and (very dirty) comedy bits over the proceeding decade, but nothing particularly interesting. Until I washed up here.
The rest you can see for yourself.