Friday, September 20, 2013

Stories for the Boy

That F’ing Monkey had its 900th update this week; it almost had its last.  This happens quite a bit actually.  I look to the numerous bookshelves in my room and find myself crushed by jealousy.  This website started as a writing exercise, became a failed money maker, and then…  Well I don’t know anymore.  Very rarely am I actually creating anything, usually I’m just reacting to something that is already out there.  At some point I’d like to be able to place a book in my son’s hands and say “this is the book that your father wrote.” 

Now I have a finished novel that I haven’t done anything with in over a year.  I do want to polish it once more and see about getting it published.  This is not the book I want to share with my son as he grows up though; a detective investigating snuff films isn’t the kind of family bonding I’m going for.  There are other ideas though, characters that have lived in my head for years that are dying to be written about.  Some of them are original and others are table top role playing game characters that still haunt my thoughts long after their games have ended. 

I’m no Tolkien and I’m not comparing myself to him, but I want to create a world that is unique to my own stories.  As he grows up I want to tell my son stories of heroism, victoires, sacrifices, and betrayals.  Bedtime stories wouldn’t be pulled from someone else’s book, but directly from my stories.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this and it’s likely you’ll see more about this as I start to plot things out.  Character backgrounds, races, creatures, cities, and things like that might start popping up more and more.  My son is only a year and a half old, so I have some time to get my shit together before he starts understanding the stories I tell him.  Besides right now he only wants to look at pictures of cars.

1 comment:

  1. I feel you, man. I've gone through a similar cycle the last 12 months. It was about a year ago that I decided to scale way back on blogging so that I could focus more time on writing fiction.

    That was useful because it got me away from thinking about the blog as it's own endeavor and pushed me towards thinking of it as a support for my own writing. In other words, I quit thinking of it as a fan blog and started thinking of it as an author's blog.

    That's been incredibly liberating and - I think - has ironically improved the blog to the point that I've ramped up my output on it again. But it's all stuff I WANT to be blogging about instead of what I think other people want to read. And I prioritize it differently now so that fiction comes first.

    Whatever you ultimately come up with for That F'ing Monkey, I hope it's in support and not instead of your fiction.

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