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People have always been encouraging me to write from the time I was about eight, after I wrote that short story about the red hot air balloon in the third grade one dreamy afternoon. Later, in junior high school, I wrote stories about the long backpacking and canoeing trips my dad and I would go on with the Boy Scouts, most of which went unpublished and have since been lost on a stack of 3.5" DSDD Mac-formatted floppies that disappeared not long after the now-ancient family Mac SE was donated to Goodwill in the mid-90's.
In high school, I fed the writer's disease by indulging in intensely analytical literary essays and a cheap play that now seems woefully derrivative. And college found me tapping away under the pressure of deadline in the drippy, dark basement of the University of Texas communications building, where the Daily Texan's offices were located.
When I went to graduate school, I tried writing essays and e-mailing them to some of my trusted friends, but was systematically rejected by people who neither had the time or the desire to wade through an analysis of the crisis in classical music or an existential examination of religion. I reduced the e-mailing to simple quotes, which incited quite a ruckuss now and then and made me the focal point of much angry disagreement. So that stopped.
A few months ago, a friend of mine from grad. school agreed to publish a magazine with me, so urbaniamagazine was born. We published 2 issues before it became clear that neither of us was ready to run any kind of real publication with deadlines and paid writers. As I write this, I am looking at two screenplays on my virtual desktop that have been started, neither of them finished, mostly because I feel paralyzed by a lack of a coherant message in them.
So here I sit, embarking on yet another mode of written expression, the online version of the long-venerated journal. Why a journal? Why not write a novel, finish the screenplays, or submit some stuff to The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly? Because at this point I need the instant gratification of completion on a daily basis, every time I hit the "publish" button. Because I need a live audience, even if only theoretically attendant, to summon up my highest muse and most earnest efforts, to literally keep me honest. And becuase, quite frankly, I need the intellectual companionship that will hopefully develop as my discourse connects with others.
Writing helps order the mind, to make sense out of the apparent chaos that confronts us in hopes that some odd epiphanies may percolate up from the day-to-day minutia and steer our long lives into peace and happiness. As peace descends on us, we become, in a sense, more sane. It is this promise that has driven all of my written efforts since I became conscious of a need for a personal philosophy - the root cause of the writer's midnight disease. Here's to yet another journey in that vein, one that is hopefully long and well worth the ride.
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