Introduction
(Or, The Point of This Essay)

I've managed to snatch myself out of my usual routine -- grabbed a few days vacation to spend time with my parents in New England -- and as often happens, it's given me the time and (mental) space to do some thinking. The essay I'm going to try to scratch together right now, for example, is the result of a few hours I just spent out with my parents on our sailboat. Whether I was curled up on the deck, avoiding the wind by laying low in the cabin, or sprawling across the bow, my head was busy sorting through the flotsam and jetsam of my mind. Hopefully the sea air did its work and I'm able to say what I intend to.

I suppose before I go on, I should give a brief summary of exactly what I'm going to go on about, so to satisfy that requirement, let me say that I really just want to share some of the significant ways in which my life, particularly my mental life, has been affected by reading Storm's writing. I only started on Storm two months ago but perhaps because other processes were already at work, it seems like it's been longer than that. I feel almost as if I've started on some course of therapy and all sorts of kinks are being worked out of my system and all sorts of systems, long inactive or tied up in knots, have been freed to do their work again. The more I become aware of this, the more I feel like I'd like to catalog some of this change and share it with others who knows the feeling. I also, of course, want to share this with Storm because I tend to want to express gratitude for gifts such as hers.

Logs In The Fire
(Or, My Career In Fiction)

If you want to know me as a writer or are interested in the evolution of writers in general, this is the section that deals with that and may prove interesting. However, if you only care about Storm, you'll need to scroll down to the last few paragraphs.

I've always considered myself a writer, but until about a year and half ago, I'd shied away from writing fiction. I used to write fantastic little stories as a child but later on as a teenager, while I wrote out ideas for screenplays, I avoided writing stories in favor of the types of writing that became my staples: autobiography, non-fiction essays and poetry. I had alternate universes -- my own as well as those originated by other people -- running in my head and ones I would act out in the privacy of my bedroom doing impromptu plays, but I would hardly ever commit these worlds to paper.

I was still a writer, however. For autobiography, I would write about myself in journals, essays, papers for school. This tendency to reflect on myself and my past stemmed in large part from the fact that things had been so bad for me when I was younger that I hadn't been able to write about it. As a teenager and later on in college and beyond, I decided to make up for lost time by examining myself, my family and my world as thoroughly as I could.

Besides the autobiography came works that were further apart from myself. I loved to write research papers and essays and I always did well with them and of course being in school encouraged that sort of work, so I focused on that with fanatical zeal. In college I majored in journalism and was a reporter for the college paper and became an editorial writer, where I mixed the personal and the world of news.

The only real area in which I allowed a more fantastical world to be expressed was in my poetry. It was madness, what I wrote, full of all the despair I was channeling away inside myself. When I wrote it was like spilling blood. None of my poetry was descriptive of physical places; it was entirely emotional, all the existential angst and suicidal thoughts and paranoia my young soul could muster.

So this is how it was for me until fairly recently. I wrote reams of essays, editorials for papers, "copy" for my web sites, technical documentation for work, occasional poetry and -- I almost forgot -- a good deal of satire which although sometimes fictional in nature, wasn't taken too seriously but done as part of my tendency to play with my friends poking fun at the world. My friends and I did a few fun 'zines and I did an online 'zine but still, no stories, no plots, nothing fictional, came to mind.

Meanwhile -- and this is a big "meanwhile" -- all along, since I was very, very young, I had been consuming huge amounts of fiction and huge amounts of information. I am rather partial to non-fiction reference books, to tell the truth, but still, I had taken in massive amounts of other worlds created by other authors. As already mentioned, a few authors, over the years, had leant me universes with which I tinkered around in my head or in my "plays." I talked to characters and played with them. My first big plaything was Shogun by James Clavell. Then there were two which provided me with entertainment for years: The Chosen and The Promise by Chaim Potok and the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. For the most part I didn't write down any of my escapades but there are a few surviving traces of some of what I suppose must be termed "fan fiction," although at the time I wouldn't have had a name for it. None of it was polished, none of it made much sense, and none of it was ever meant to be shared.

Fast forward to about a year and a half ago. I'm a busy web designer with a new full-time contract job, a frenetic lifestyle involving leading up a local neighborhood organization, running my own part-time web design business, operating several highly active web sites, doing a lot of mass transit advocacy work and basically doing my best to burn the candle at both ends and in the middle as well. I start up this new job and because it takes a while for the company who's contracted me to figure out what I should be doing, I have some time on my hands. Naturally I start nosing around on the web -- this is what a large portion of my time is spent doing, seeing as the web is my medium and I work so fast that I have time left over to explore whatever corners of the web I desire. So somehow or other I decide to poke into one of my old worlds, the Vampire Chronicles. I had kept up with the series and was still doing "plays" and thinking about it but I'd never shared that world with others. Boy, was I in for a major change!

Those of you who are familiar with my Vampire Chronicles fan fiction don't need to be told what sort of an evolution has occurred in my writing. After discovering the various corners of the VC world out there (cloaked in secrecy due to the, um, proprietary nature of the author) and reading massive amounts of other people's versions of that world -- fan fic beyond my wildest imaginings! -- within a couple of months I gave up my "plays" in favor of a means of communication that seemed more worthwhile and more capable of being shared.

My first effort was far from clumsy, but from that beginning to now, the writing has improved so much that for me there is no comparison. The characters and dialogue and description were always there, but in the first series of stories, there were missing linkages and weaknesses in the plots where I had avoided issues instead of figuring them out and taking them on. However, with time and more reading and the help of several good editors, I started to take myself more seriously and try harder, to make my stories more than doodles but something that other people would actually read and expect to be good, worthwhile, fully fledged-out.

My last few VC stories have, I will say without any hemming or hawing, been fantastic and, from my perspective as well as that of my readers', been pretty much perfectly executed in every detail. One story in particular, where I collaborated with another author, continues to freak me out because I simply can't believe I wrote it, even though I am positive I did. I'm to the point where I think I probably won't be able to surpass myself in that area, although I in no way intend to stop writing in that genre, Anne Rice and her lawyers be damned.

On to Storm. I know this is where you, as readers, probably expect me to go into the experience of writing the Wraeththu fan fiction I've recently posted to various boards and web sites, but in fact this is something I only intend to gloss over. I read that trilogy probably six weeks ago. It basically blew off the top of my skull and instantly gave me a new and incredibly absorbing world to play around with. All my other worlds had grown stale and slightly grubby from overuse. As for the fan fic, that was something I had to do and which I enjoy and which I intend to enjoy in the future, but the real offshoot of doing that work was that by moving to a new genre and writing a story with nothing but original characters (albeit a world I borrowed, all credit to Storm, who should get every cent, pfennig, etc. that comes out of the enterprise), I realized that I finally felt ready to do that which I hadn't done seriously in... well, I don't know how long, if in fact I ever did do it. I think that finally I am read y to quit avoiding the obvious and write something original. I've done enough warming up and now I'm ready.

Now the question, what exactly am I ready for? Also, how does Storm's writing tie into that? I answer those questions below.

In the Heavens
(Or, Wendy Realizes Something Big)

Since reading Wraeththu, I've done my usual work rereading compulsively. Can't help it really. Some people read a book a "first time," "second time," "third time," and so on, but I don't - when I like a book I read it continuously, over and over and over until there are scenes I've read 100 times. When I set on a book, I leave it around and pick at it up twenty times a day and turn to random sections and read. I read certain sections over and over and over. I read them out loud, in my head, in the bathroom, while I'm cooking, lying on the bed. I don't care. I want it all to fill my brain and I want to suck it all up and absorb every last drop.

Two weeks ago, I picked up the Grigori trilogy. Well, actually, to be more explicit, I managed to order each book in the trilogy via a different bookseller and put them in a stack on my desk. Finally around a week ago I started very gently dabbling at Stalking Tender Prey. I had a busy week and I suppose the dabbling was due to my desire to avoid something all-consuming. By Tuesday I was absorbed enough to bring the book on my commute and read it at work and walking down the hall. By Thursday I was flying up to Boston with the book firmly in my hands, totally and utterly sucked in.

So there I am, flying up over North Carolina or Pennsylvania or who knows where, reading the book, when I look out over the heavens, all those wonderful white clouds and golden sunlight, and suddenly a pot of thoughts I'd been simmering for a few weeks boiled over. I remember the sun was shining on my hair and bringing out the dyed copper highlights when I thought suddenly, I could create a world. I suppose being up in the heavens like that made me feel sort of godlike (hey, or goddesslike, let's be fair). I mean, suddenly I had a thought that I'd either never had before or had suppressed, which was that although I had spent years absorbing an even obsessing over other people's worlds, I could create ones of my own. I could really and truly write a story, a book, a something.

I stuck with this thought a long time, taking a rest from the book. I asked myself why exactly I had come to that conclusion right then, at that moment. The answer was so clear: Storm. The evidence was right there in my hands. The way I felt about that book. The way I feel about Wraeththu and that world. There are simply qualities in that book that set off registers in my consciousness that no other books had stimulated They reach heights I had always longed for but never reached. Perhaps I had thought of writing books before, but I know that before reading these five novels, I had always thought subconsciously that I wouldn't be able to because, quite simply, I wouldn't be able to stay within the proper sphere and would be too limited by the notion of what is expected within a book. I had felt I would be too hemmed in.

Storm's books have clued me in to a possibility that for some reason I had been blind to, wild contrarian iconoclast though I am: I can write my own kind of book. I think in my own mind, in all my reading, even of my favorite books, I'd been aware that the authors were keeping within a certain proscribed set of boundaries for what can and can't happen. I've enjoyed many types of novels -- dystopian, historical, horror, Edwardian, etc. - and in doing so, I've always, I think, accepted the fact that authors had limits that they'd imposed on themselves either subconsciously or consciously. In every book I read, I felt there was an implied understanding that even if the novel was pushing boundaries or providing the author with space to be creative, all the ideas were compromised. In order to get published and be palatable to a minimum number of readers, books are tamed. They are made manageable, they are kept simple, they avoid certain topics, they avoid being over-the-top.

Needless to say, Storm's books have struck me as completely different from all the other books I've read. From what I've read so far and some background reading I've done, I think the biggest difference is that in her writing she's committing some sort of divine transgression where rather than tempering her writing with thoughts of what would be acceptable to others or to convention, she keeps the writing relative to itself and its universe. Throughout the novels I've read, I constantly get the sense that other writers would have avoided a lot of things she writes about or would never have even considered the ideas. She explores ideas and plots and characters and notions that fascinate her and to me it all translates into the writing and makes it something magical. It's like she's broken some kind of sound barrier or broken into a new dimension as far as I'm concerned because to me she's shown me that there is a path out there for me.

So back to the airplane, there I was, 30,000 feet up, thinking to myself, basically, "OK, if Storm can work that sort of magic, if she can wield that sword and just say 'Fuck it!' and plop her world onto paper like that (not "like that" as in easily, but "like that" as in "that way"), then I could do it as well." I don't want to have to worry about limits but I think I had been worried. Of course I'm not saying no limits at all, but I mean no limits in terms of how I would allow myself to think and to explore and create the stories. I understand the need to have organization and purpose and use forethought. And I accept that writing what you want to certainly doesn't equate to someone else caring a fuck about it, liking it, or paying you for it. For me the "no limits" idea is one more of saying, "OK, don't be afraid to go anywhere because you might be the only person who can go there."

Maybe in the future I will kick some ass. Right now I guess I just feel empowered to.

On The Pier
(Or, One More Way Storm Has Triggered Me)

I'm finally done with talking about Storm has affected my writing. Now I want to talk about ONE way (and I'll stick to one way), she's affected my emotional life as well. The characters and descriptions in the books I've read have resuscitated me. Parts of me (and not just the writing part) that had been dormant or under restraints for ages have been released. Old muscles are flexing and old senses are coming into play. Sure, they'd been awakened somewhat by my VC fanfic reading and writing, but I think the real work was done (and is being done) by Storm.

What the heck am I talking about? Well, at the moment, what I'm specifically referring to is the fact that Storm's books (Wraeththu and Grigori) have made me come back to myself and inhabit my senses. I have tremendous reserves of sensory power -- I've often thought too much power. Reflecting back on my childhood, I sometimes have wondered whether I was mildly autistic or suffering from some sort of mild schizophrenia because I swear, my senses used to be completely out of control and overwhelming to me.

I used to go into what I'd term fugue states which were these amazing moments (sometimes quite lengthy) of altered consciousness where my senses would come on so strong I was living in a different reality. I remember being in elementary school and this would happen a lot. Everything would be "normal" and suddenly it was as if someone had turned up some sort of amplifier and a zoom lens in my head, because the works would get unbearably... intense. All the sounds around me would sound strange -- very loud. I could hear things that were so quiet I shouldn't have been able to hear them. I was aware of my body in ways I never would be normally. The way I saw things would shift so that suddenly everything around me would lose its familiarity and become alien. I could see details and connections and patterns that would otherwise be invisible. I used to get spooked out by those state of mind. I remember going to my mother and asked her if things "sounded funny" or "sounded louder" to her because I didn't know if it was just me or if the whole world really had changed for a few minutes. She always told me I was bonkers. I'm not convinced.

Anyway, that's an extreme example, but basically at one point in my life, my senses would get swamped. My emotions would get swamped as well. I'm to this day convinced that some people have emotions that are just regularly stronger than other people's. I think I'm one of the people who feel everything with way, way, way too much amplification. It's hard to deal with and so in certain respects I've learned to distance myself. I could go into a lot more detail here but I'm not going to pull out my mental guts and dissect them on the table of psychological analysis. The summary of it all, however, is that like my senses, my feelings have been pushed down for the sake of convenience. Not that I'm emotionally dead because that certainly isn't the case, and not that I'm not expressive of emotions or that I don't feel them strongly (I still feel them much too strongly at times, in my opinion), but it's like they're such firecrackers I tend to avoid a lot of stuff that might set them off. Does the world need to see my fireworks?

So. I was standing on a pier in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, yesterday afternoon when I realized that since reading Storm, esp. since reading Grigori, I'd felt my mind opening up to experiencing these senses again. I felt like I achieved sensory feelings similar to my childhood states but that I could handle them. At my parents' house, where I'm visiting, on the streets of Boston, in the sands of Kittery, Maine, I was feeling stuff on every level. I could see details with my eyes, hear sounds with my ears, feel the grains of sands on my skin, smell the salt in the air, and it was like there was a veil I'd dropped down over the whole world without realizing it. My view had been dimmed, blocked, but now I can see again!

It may sound like this is unrelated to Storm but no, it's very related. This phenomenon stems from notions of the books and the way they're written. Simply put, reading about characters with heightened perceptions and strong emotions seems to have equipped me to deal with my own. Instead of thinking I'm overdoing it with the way I'm experiencing things, I feel like I do in fact exist on a scale, even if my comparables are fictional characters. I can be a whole being and let myself be what I am with ears and eyes and tongue and skin and heart open.