Today please welcome Lance: Anxiety ridden, punk rock listening, word nerd, music obsessed, robot-human hybrid husband, father, red velvet cake enthusiast, pumpkin pie expert and writer living with four women and not talking about Fight Club.
Inventor of #100wordsong
Serialized fiction of a punk rock princess – The Ballad of Helene Troy
Serialized fiction of a grieving widower and his headstrong teenage daughter, Violet- Soul To Body
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All I wanted was a hamburger and a scoop of potato salad. I stepped up to the picnic table and began making my plate. A shrill voice came from my right side. My name was mentioned. Something snotty was said about my voluminous social media habits. I knew I was faced with Sophie’s Choice as a writer with a limited social life. Do I defend myself and my active online activity or do I smile and let my cousin run all over me, in jest?
I started writing when I was very young. Stories about baseball players, superheroes, and rock stars filled the fifty-cent notebooks my mom bought me in the last aisle of the grocery store. By the fourth grade, I allowed the rest of the world to see something I’d written. It was a story about a boy and his thirty-foot pet snake named Mike. While my teachers, classmates and family thought they read a short tale of wonder and imagination, I knew it was my insides pleading for a brother, because I only had a younger sister I had to take care of and didn’t like. The neurosis started. After getting the blue ribbon for best fourth grade story, I didn’t stop writing for a very long time.
If Love Is A Battlefield then the internet is a post-apocalyptic dystopia. It’s the best and worst of society. What you decide your experience to be depends on your survival skils. To borrow from the pop culture phenomenon of the moment, you better have a crossbow, common sense, and help from like-minded friends. I started my new world quest in early 2005. I was in a bad marriage with someone who didn’t support my writing. I hadn’t number-two penciled a damn thing since 1998 (when I married the first time), and I was exceptionally lonely. Message boards, fantasy football chat forums, and a small writer’s group I stumbled upon were my outlets. As my marriage led to a divorce the following year, I began a music blog on MySpace that emcompassed concert and CD reviews, opinion pieces of new and old bands, and general music discussion. I wasn’t prepared for the intense nastiness that. I didn’t handle it well. The music blog grew, and despite over 500 everyday readers, some free concert tickets, and an insider’s view of bands, artists, and the music business, I decided my charred ego and single dad needs were more important, so for the second time in my life, I stopped writing.
You know those poor saps who walk around with smudged fingers, bad eyesight, and a paperback something rolled up in their pocket(s). Yeah, hi, I’m the guy sucking on a Diet Dr. Pepper next to you on a plane. I write because I have to. It makes me feel alive. When I started my current blog- have you read it? It doesn’t completely suck. The link is here. You can find me here on Twitter and here on Facebook.
I was looking to unload the thoughts in notebooks I began writing in after my second marriage in 2008. My wife is very supportive, and insisted that I blog as a way to get out my thoughts, fictional and real. The second chance at being on the innertwitterfacebooknets surprised me. It’s been positive. I’ve cultivated a corner of the web full of serialized fiction, sometimes humorous postcards of my life, also a second chance with a wife and now three daughters – 16, 8, and 7, and occasional posts on how blogging works for me.
Friends? What the hell are those? I live with four women, work a real job, and try to keep up with online writing assignments. Yes, I’ve made friends. I’ve encountered a community of like-minded writing weirdos who blog because they have to. They need to get it out. Blogging has become therapy and emotional release for all of us.
I smiled through the wisecracks of my wise-cracking cousin. The burgers and potato salad were really friggin’ good. I’m proud of my online life these days. As I barrel toward publishing something in paperback form that you can roll into your pocket(s), I’m heartened by what I’ve made of my second chance at writing, tweeting, facebooking and blogging. After being a husband and father, writer is really all I had left to accomplish. I think I made it.
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