A Personal History of the World

I'm a writer. I write fiction. That is to say, I make stuff up and slap it onto a page. If it's good, and if I'm lucky, a few people will read it and some of them will come up to me, or call me, or drop me a line and say, "Hey, that stuff was pretty good. I like your style, kid." It happens sometimes.

It's nice to have an audience, wonderful really, but it isn't the main reason I write. See, I'm foolish enough to believe that I'm actually creating something besides "content". I call it my personal history of the world, an imaginative appendix to reality. Inside my head it's nothing but potential; a swirl of chaos, invention, and intent, but once it hits the page it's fixed. Solid. It exists, and the more people who read it the more imaginatively real it becomes.

Whoah.

It all sounds so serious, doesn't it? I suppose it could be, if this was someone else's show, but I'm the demiurge atop this particular sub-creation and in my world serious is trumped by strange. In my world, the Devil plays poker in a cheap motel room with a redneck prophet who just happens to have the bones of the baby Jesus in the trunk of his car. In my world, a dying Edgar Allan Poe is the focus of a bizarre pilgrimage, while in a distant time in faraway Japan, a heartless bandit is sheltered from his pursuers by a beautiful trio of foxes. It's a world of war, in which a young man is afflicted by the hideous ghost of his brother and troubled by the unhappy inheritance of a gentle heart. A world where the heroes of the Trojan War reenact their eternal drama with bullets and blood on dirty, crime-ridden streets.

My world is serious, it's silly, it's real and surreal. Sometimes it's poetic and many times it's vulgar. It's countless different things, but it's one world and it's mine. I'm its historian and I'm happy to share it with you. I have a lot of work ahead of me.