Writing

I started my first novel when I was about ten years old. It was science fiction, though I wasn't really aware of sf as a genre, nor of the word "genre" for that matter. The main character was a young male Air Force pilot (my father and brother were both Air Force pilots) who flew the B1 bomber. He was also an astronaut. In the first (and only?) chapter, he arrives at some government building to be briefed on an emergency mission to Jupiter.

Even before that, in fourth grade, I wrote a love note to a fifth grade girl that I had a crush on.

In high school, I wrote my first poem that I remember, which began:

When will it end
this state of utter confusion

Hilarious. It was published in the school literary journal for that semester. In my senior year at the American school in Athens, Greece, I took a class called Advanced Essay, in which we quantified various features of our writing, with the objective being to wield more control over it. I enjoyed it immensely.

When I started college at the University of Texas, I declared journalism as my major - I wanted to write, and I loved photography (my parents had just recently bought me my first SLR, a Fujica St605n, which I still have). That lasted a semester or two before I realized that I didn't want to write newspaper copy. I switched to English, and finally to Secondary (high school level) Education, with emphases in English and Physical Science (basic Chemistry and Physics).

One class I took at UT was a short story writing class. It was an intense experience - I learned just how difficult writing can be sometimes, and also just how talented some people are. I wrote some stories that I love to this day.

Right after graduating, I entered my poetry phase. I wrote probably a hundred poems, and experimented with sound, rhythm, and meaning. It was thoroughly engrossing. I submitted a manuscript of poetry to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, titled "Letters From A Far Country". I had a poem published in The Austin Chronicle titled "December City." That poem, and several others, were recently published online at the Southern Cross Review, as was a short story of mine that I wrote about ten years ago.

More recently, as a product of my unfinished Master's program in Philosophy at the University of Montana, I self-published my thesis, prosaically titled Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness. That's not presumptuous, is it??? I had submitted the manuscript to several publishers, and The University of Missouri Press eventually asked for a complete manuscript after reading my proposal and several chapters. They passed on it, saying it was too short.

Last year I had my first try at journalistic writing. I got a gig writing a monthly op-ed for the online magazine Modern Republic, on any topic of international news. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The gig ended when the editor quit paying me (John Ramirez still owes me $120) and announced ex post facto that the magazine had dropped the International News section. Most of those essays are on this blog.

Right now, the editor at The Southern Cross Review is looking at a chapter of my book in which I analyze... shit, lots of very, very deep ontological stuff - it's frickin' philosophy, after all. Even I have to concentrate to follow the argument. We'll see soon whether that essay shows up online.

I currently have two manuscripts 'in progress': about 150 pages of a novel that's fairly obviously the story of my time as a graduate student, when I was so deeply involved with my subject of study (the evolution of consciousness) that I couldn't turn off the thinking even when I wanted to; and a collection of essays touching on phenomenology and nature.

I love language. I love communicating with the written word. And the logos became flesh, and dwelt in us.