And the "rugged" picture is one you've seen here before, but since he mentions it in this entry I have to use it again.
For whom had came to this section and wonder who the fuck is this writer behind the website you see. Some of the stories that are hosted here are part of the website Writings From The Grave. If you want to learn more about me you came to the right place. I had been writing since the mid 1990s, maybe some in the late 1980s if you count all the old letter that I had written when I was really young but mainly I had done a lot of the writings you see on the website from when I was starting at the age of 14 with The Glenbard Horror, but I had done revisions to them as I got older. Some would see some of the writing I have done in a literary webjournal. This is where I would write some of my sleep patterns and the others would be from when I would travel and have the dreams noted. I had been inspired as a horror writer much by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his protege, Robert A. Bloch. But as many horror writers who are writing around the time I am writing, many had adopted the writings of Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite as their influence then dress like characters of Anne Rice's books.
As you would see in my picture here taken on February 25th, 2001, by Carol Kelley, I tend to adopt a more rugged mystique. I tend to thank the Boy Scouts of America for giving me the rugged quality that I was looking for in my writing. I had explored caves when I was younger and done some rock climbing in Canada when I was older. What inspires that was reading Jack London when I was 12 in middle school and the fiction that was in Boy's Life, this is where I learned about Isaac Asimov. I had been intrigued by the landscape of Canada for the longest time so that is why I had gone to Canada in December of 2000. As Lovecraft and Poe I try the best I can to be well read and well travelled. I also struggle with a mental disorder -- two to be more accurate. I had been dianosed with a learning disability in 1995, which was the reason I was discharged from the Navy -- and under the advice of a doctor I kept a journal. Then my cousin found that journal in mid 1996, and then she another friend of mine said I should try my hand at writing.
I had sent some of my stories to publishers and got a lot of rejection letters so out of the result of that I decided to do a website to see if I can get some luck that way. The challege was also living near a major Christian college, Wheaton College. So there was a lot of pressure from the students there because at the time I was starting out I was a devote born again Christian. I did have an extent collection of horror novels as well as books that were given to me by friends in the area who were devote Christians because they did not approve of the idea that I wrote the genre that I was very much moved to write. Even when I was 14 I had been asked to write a horror story for an assignment which was a werewolf with a machete -- it came a long way from that as of now.
Now let us go forward to the new century, here I am now in my mid twenties and getting older as time goes on. Examples of what I do as a writer are on my websites and some of the online journals I run. I paid the price many times over for the talent I have -- paid with the woman I once loved leaving me and having to adopt out a * which I was too sick to raise. Now as it would be as for many years to come -- the way I need to remain stable is with the use of medication, that being Welbutrin SR. Sometimes people aske if my illness is demon induced but that is a bit of a contraversy when one mixes religion and mental illness.
As a result I am now disabled, disability for a mental illness is very contraversial now or days but I grown to accept the fact that I am sick. Though there is subject of much debate by the mainstream about the mentally ill. Since that I had found many places who support the mentally ill -- and felt that I am not alone. I had been stabbed and lived on the street -- so for me to live the rest of my life with Chronic Bipolar Disease, I had grown to accept that. I walked into churches before I knew I had the illness, when I knew I had ADHD -- they would say that I am not sick and that is something I knew they were lying right to my face.
Then I would hear that then they would put the mentally ill in with homosexuals, which is something I object to because I don't agree with the homosexual lifestyle. So I hear so many of these fucking bastards telling me that I am in the wrong for disagreeing; but all I have to say is this -- lets agree to disagree. Just don't get in my face because I refer to rainbow flaggers in the derogatory. I might be gothic, but there is something that I have say about the gothic lifestyle -- not all people who are gothic are homosexual, pansexual, pagan, Satanist, and dress like characters from Anne Rice or Poppy Z. Brite's novels. Some of us listen to speed and death metal, read H.P. Lovecraft, and are very much straight. This is rare to see but we are around.
All gothic people are very artistic in nature, the gothic writers never dress the same or borrow from the other gothic personalities but none of them are alike. If I had met a congregation that was gothic friendly, I just might still be in a churrch today but one youth pastor fucked all that up. (Pastor Shawn Addams of The Christian Fellowship in Mason City, Iowa.) I had seen a lot for someone of my age -- though there is a lot more to see and I plan to be around a long time. That youth pastor could not break my will to be a horror writer, and to denounce my gothic writings. He called my writings nothing and blank pages. I know and there always will be those who would scorn what they done, but they had given something to generations to come -- the inspiration and drive for their imitators to do the genre and take it to the next level.
When there are your extremists who would burn books -- it is almost as it would appear out of the pages of Ray Bradbury's Farenheight 452 which was about censorship. I had idenified with this book so much as well as the writings of Ayn Rand when I read her book Anthem which was in my senior year of high school. I had never thought that book would play itself out now in what I am doing. In some ways I am influenced by Ayn Rand -- since she had a very philosophical way of looking at society. What is comes down to when it comes to writers as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and Edgar Allen Poe are that people are very much frightened of what they don't understand.
This is true with everything else, and more so since the attacks on the United States where so many died without reason. Sometimes the horror writer would be the one who reflects it so graphically or could not begin to find the words to describe what exactly happened to the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. This had changed the entire rules of writing horror in the new century. Online journals have the possibilities of finding a new writer a lot more promising, and one would never tell where they would come out of the ashes from the miles of death.
Time will give the reader the perspective on the older stories, the question is if they would stand the test of time. Being in that mind -- I know where I stand now but in the time when my sister would be in her twenties and I know when I made it is when in their time are writing short stories which were inspired by my work. Tragedies create for dark literature -- for that being in the gothic mind there will be more creative souls would come in the eyes of the written word.
