On Vacation Quote...

"In a city of illusion, where change is what the city does, it's no wonder Las Vegas is the court of last resort, the last place to start over, to reinvent yourself in the same way that the city does, time after time. For some it works; for some it doesn't, but they keep coming and trying."

-Hal Rothman, Neon Metropolis

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Quote: Audrey Hepburn

Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm ... As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands. One for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

- Audrey Hepburn, British actress and humanitarian


Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Is he dead yet?

I sit here on a Sunday morning very much enjoying working on my current manuscript.  I’m a little more than halfway through my Thriller 1 first draft and last week I wrote one of the biggest twists in the novel, where not one but two characters are found to be quite dead.  That is all well and good but I know I can’t let things fall into a big lull.  The next several scenes involve the investigation at that crime scene.  My fear even though there are some facts that will be important to the story, I don’t want it to become a slog through a bunch of technical jargon and detailed evidence concluding with the reader falling asleep.  However, I also can’t leave my foot on the story’s gas all the time.  So what to do? 


I’ve tried to find a nice spot in the middle.  While the reader ponders how the primary suspect in one crime just became the victim of another, I have allowed some tension to manifest between a couple of the investigators.  Nothing overly dramatic.  I don’t want the feeling of open warfare between my young detective and his veteran partner to overwhelm that story.  But there is room for some dynamics of personality between them.  I want to create some realistic discord while they continue to have the same overall goal – to solve two different crimes that are now possibly tied together.  While one detective has optimistic hopes of solving the crimes, the other fears that even if they figure out what is really going on, they will still be unable to produce enough evidence to bring anything to trial. 


I’m am leading this down the road to where they will disagree with who the primary suspect is, following their own investigations until a critical point is reached where one of them puts themselves in jeopardy by being wrong and the other finds out the truth, but potentially too late.  It’s a slow build of a secondary storyline that will be intersecting with the primary at just the optimum moment.

If nothing else, I’m having a heck of a lot of fun writing it.

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend.

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

To prologue or not to prologue, that is the question!

Photo courtesy of Christian Ries.

I was reading Devon’s wonderful blog – Ink In My Coffee (yes, this is the point when you should follow the link and check it out) – and she brought up the problem that many in the publishing industry are currently down on use of the prologue in novels.  It seems to me a strange thing to hate something that is just one tool in a writing/publishing toolbox.  I sat back and started thinking about why that might be (I do that quite often) and the only reason that made any sense is that writers must be misusing that tool and so the kneejerk reaction is for publishers to say, “off with its head!”

However, there has to be a reason that the prologue exists, right?  It didn’t just crawl out of the ooze and darken the pages of books for no purpose than to make editors squirm.  So there must be a specific set of circumstances where a prologue can be an ideal way to begin a novel.  Many novels – maybe most – won’t have this situation.  I think that some novel, including my science fiction manuscript, are a good example of where it can be used effectively.  So here goes the justification:

If there is a scene which contains a great point of conflict with a real hook for the reader’s interest that falls well before the timeline of the main story and provides critical information, I think a prologue can be very useful.  It stakes its claim that it is before the main body of the story.

Some may say that this can be accomplished later in the story with a flashback.  However, flashbacks are messy and always slow the story down requiring the reader to do mental gymnastics.  Sometimes a flashback is ok, but if it can be avoided, why not do so?  Also, if that scene has a powerful hook, the ideal place for it is at the beginning of the novel where a hesitant buyer may become fascinated with your story and make a purchase so they can keep reading.  Isn’t that what all writers and publishers hope for? 

So to editors and publishers I would say, don’t be so quick to judge a prologue just because it is a prologue.  If it advances the story and captures the reader’s attention, it works, potentially better than any other device.  To writers, make sure the prologue does all of these things and does them well.  Otherwise, you risk becoming part of the problem.    

So what say you?  Is the prologue a dinosaur of a bygone era or has it been unfairly stripped of its place in the writing toolbox? 

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Shangri La??

Maybe.  It is also known as the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.

My wife would kill me...


Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Just the Facts Ma'am

I have to say I am quite happy with my writing over the last week.  I’ve completed four more scenes within my Thriller 1 manuscript, including a devilishly complicated scene that I had been dreading ever since I put it in the outline.  In spite of the dread, once I got a few sentences into it, I found my writing rhythm and managed to put it all together without too much trouble.  Has anyone else experienced this before?  Have you ever dreaded writing a particular scene or story and put it off only to find that once you actually sat down and forced yourself to start writing it all of a sudden came very easily?  That is exactly what happened to me with that 1,600 word scene.  In the end, I’m very happy with the draft of it – and that was the goal. 

So now it’s time to keep moving.

This brings me to another part of writing.  Research.  One of the best parts of living in the 21^st century is the overwhelming availability of information at the tip of your mouse.  Just type a few words into a search engine and voila!  Instant information at your command.

Or is it?

One problem is there is a MASSIVE amount of incorrect information out on the web.  Anybody can write anything and there are plenty of examples of misinformation being disseminated as fact to millions of people without anything knowing any better. 

Have you heard the one about the congressional legislation to tax emails? 

How about the one about Richard Gere and the hamster?  Thank God that turned out to not be true. 

It has gotten so far out of control that entire websites (snopes.com is a favorite of mine) are devoted to combating this scourge of the information age.

So what’s a writer to do?  Original sources and large commercial news agencies are often more reliable.  But even they are not without their failings.  My brother is a police detective and he will be the first to tell you that half of the news accounts of the cases he has worked on have had major mistakes in the facts they have reported.  Pretty scary, huh?

Ultimately, it is your responsibility as the writer to do your due diligence and get your facts from the best sources available.  I freely admit that I use the internet extensively for information I use in my writing.  However, it is only one source.  I have also acquired over the years a shelf full of reference materials written by experts in their fields.  The biggest advantage to these kinds of books as references is that the facts have typically been vetted by multiple editors along the way.  When publishing a book, they know that there is a permanency to what is being printed on those pages and there will be little opportunity to go back and make a correction.  That doesn’t mean they are all perfect, but when I can crosscheck the book against an internet search, it provides me with two corroborating sources and a certain peace-of-mind that I got my facts straight.

Tonight I have dipped into that stash of vital information for the next scene in Thriller 1.  In this case, I needed to know the timing of postmortem lividity and rigor mortis in dead bodies.  You know – cool stuff!  It’s at least cool if you are writing a thriller.  In this case, my reference of choice was Scene of the Crime, by Anne Wingate, Ph.D.  It’s a concise guide to many of the important concepts in crime-scene investigations.  While not all-encompassing, it is a quick way to ensure that I don’t blow my story by getting the condition of that body all wrong.  I don’t want that incorrectly murdered character to murder my novel. 

Of course I have one more trump card in the deck to make sure I have my crime-scene facts correct.

I do have my brother to make sure I got the mayhem accurate.

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Quote: E.L. Doctorow

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." 

-E.L. Doctorow, American writer



Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

(Good) Better Friday

This Good Friday is an even better Friday as it is Cherie and my first wedding anniversary.  As a matter of fact, it was determined to be such an amazing year that they decided to make it one day longer!  Three hundred and sixty-six days ago I married my soulmate and best friend in the middle of an out-of-season but strikingly beautiful snow storm.  Somehow our guests managed to make it to the evening ceremony and it was a beautiful event surrounded by our friends, family and our five children.  I could not have asked for anything more than the love and support she has given me and I am a very lucky man.  I can say with all honesty and no exaggeration that this has been the best year of my life, and I am looking forward to many, many more for us to share.

Have yourself a wonderful Easter Holiday everyone!

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Is there a draft in here?

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve managed to finish going back through the first 66 scenes of Thriller 1 over the last week or so.  I have to say, I’m really happy with the story and where it is headed, especially for a first draft.  It might be a bit of a stretch to call it a first draft since it has been tweaked quite a bit from its original incarnation.  However, it is being left to stand now while I push forward with the rest of the first draft.  I have written scene 67 now.  It is funny how the first sentence or two of a new scene is such a struggle, but once my pen gets going, it is difficult to stop.

I suppose I should talk a little about how my first draft process goes.  The process has been born of a combination of evolution and trial-and-error over the years, but I am comfortable with it and have stuck with it during this manuscript.  Once I have a working outline, I will write a scene with good old fashioned pen and paper in a spiral notebook.  Yes, I’m a throwback in that regard.  Very 20^th century, I know.  However, I really like it because it disconnects me from the computer.  In this multi-screen, multi-window environment we live in now, it is just too easy to be distracted by a Facebook post or an email or whatever else might be on the computer.  I’ve also found that when I write the initial draft on the computer, it is much too easy for me to start revising sentences rather than getting the whole scene down first.  There is a certain permanency to writing with ink and paper that forces me to just keep going until I get to the end.  I’ll jam extra sentences into the margins and move stuff around with arrows and scratch all kinds of stuff out, but until I have finished the scene, I write it out by hand.  I find it interesting I am not alone in that.  The image above is actually of a handwritten page of Martin Luther from 1527.

Once I have finished the scene by hand, I will then go and type it into a Word document.  I can’t wait too long because my handwriting is so bad that even I can’t figure it out after a couple of days go by.  Each scene gets its own numbered Word document that corresponds to the outline.  I will do some editing as I type in the scene, but I try to keep it to a minimum; correcting poor sentences and listening to the computer tell me continuously how terrible my spelling is.  The primary reason I put every scene in its own file is so that once I have finished typing it in, I will save it and not look at it again.  This helps keep me moving forward.  Otherwise, I have a bad habit of going back and playing around with stuff I have already written rather than pushing the first draft forward.

So that’s my first draft process in a nutshell.  I am very curious to hear how similar or different it is from what all of you are doing with your first drafts.  Please leave comments and I will share them in a future post.

Thanks and keep writing friends.

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Quote: Stephen King

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write.  Simple as that."

-Stephen King, author


Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Evolution of a Writer - Chapter 6

For the rest of this story, click here.

Chapter 6

So, nearly fifteen years has gone by since I first put pen to paper with the intent of writing a novel and what do I have to show for it?  Quite a bit actually.  First of all, I have gained a huge amount of life experience in that time.  I know I wouldn’t be able to writing the kinds of things I am writing now when I was in my mid-20s.  I have seen some amazing things and some things that I don’t ever want to experience again.  I also gained so much from writing a blog over such a long period of time.  It taught me the format – what works well and what doesn’t.  More importantly, it helped me get over my fear of what other people would think of my writing.  The voice in my head has always been there, I just didn’t know what anyone else would think about it.  It isn’t that I don’t care what other people think, I’m just not going to let it stop me from doing what I want to do. 

As for the manuscripts, there are two.

The first one – to be known on this blog as SciFi Manuscript 1 – is an interesting one.  If you would have asked me even a week or two ago where it stood, I would have told you that it was still in storyline purgatory and I don’t know when it will resolve itself into something workable.  But a couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany regarding the storyline.  Suddenly, I clearly understood what the story was and what it wasn’t.  I now know what the real story is.  I scribbled down a bunch of notes for a new synopsis so I wouldn’t forget.  The next step with that manuscript will be putting an outline of the new storyline together.  Then I will have to go back through the nearly 300 pages of manuscript and see what can be salvaged, what needs to be rewritten and what will ultimately need to be scrapped before I can begin writing the rest of the first draft.  But I finally have a story and I am very excited!  However, it is going to have to wait until after I finish the first draft of my second manuscript.

The second manuscript – Thriller 1 – required me to go back through everything I had written to familiarize myself with the story again.  I did tweak one part of the backstory, which makes the storyline flow much better I think.  I am now working myself through all of the written scenes making sure it is all consistent as well as getting my head back into the story before I begin writing the remaining scenes.  I had written 66 of the 127 scenes I have in the outline, so I’m about halfway done with the first draft.  The best part is that Cherie read the current first draft as far as I had it.  She was pissed – pissed because she absolutely had to know what happened next.  I guess I must have a pretty good story going.  I also better get going with writing the rest or there will be no peace in our house. 

So that’s how I got to where I am now.  Where does my story go from here?  Well, I guess you will just need to stay tuned to this blog and find out for yourselves.

Happy writing my friends!

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Evolution of a Writer - Chapter 5

Photo courtesy of WikiMedia.

For the rest of this story, click here.

Chapter 5

Divorce is never fun.  It is especially hard when there are three young children involved who you love more than anything on Earth.  I could go into all the details of how it happened, why the marriage didn’t work and so on and so on.  However, the reality was that after more than 13 years, my marriage had disintegrated until in early 2010 there was nothing left other than for it to end.  Ultimately, we didn’t provide each other what the other needed and out of respect to my ex-wife and our three boys, I will keep the particulars solely between her and I, other than to see, we are all better off now.  This is the first and last time I will reference it in this blog.

What is important is that I was in a very dark and lonely place.  I was lost and felt completely alone.  My friends and family were very worried about me and for good reason.  But a serendipitous turn changed my life forever.  A chance encounter on Facebook brought me back into contact with a woman I was madly in love with twenty years earlier in my first year of college.  In a quirk of fate, she was going through a divorce at the exact same time I was.  The connection was immediate and overwhelming.  Everyone else worried that we were both moving too quickly and were out of our minds.  But we both knew, and that’s what really counted.

I intend to write a memoir of the whole experience someday, but this is a pure example of two people getting what they desperately needed at just the moment they both needed it.  We also had some amazing help from the guy upstairs.  The end result is that I am happier now than I ever thought it was possible to be.  My brother hit the nail on the head when he went through something similar.  He said:

“I walked outside one day and everything was different.  The world was alive all of a sudden.  The colors were brighter, the birds were singing and everything just felt right for the first time.”

  That was my experience when I held my soulmate in my arms again for the first time in twenty years.  We married in April of 2011 and I am so happy to report that everyone – her, me, our five children and both of our ex’s are happier and in much better places now.  It is truly an example of everyone being much better off.

But there was one thing missing.  I didn’t notice it until life finally started to slow down.  I was really happy, but there was an itch that I needed to scratch.  The writing bug had come back, but now I was in a much better place to do something about it.  And the best part…I have a person in my life that is encouraging me unconditionally to go for it!

Next, where my writing now stands and what I’m going to do about it.

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

So what do you think?

This is just a short post today.  I hope you are enjoying my Evolution of a Writer story.  There will be another installment coming tomorrow.  Feel free to ask questions and leave comments.

So, what do you think of the new look of the blog?  I can’t take credit for it.  My wonderful wife Cherie did this for me and I have to say it is much better than anything I could ever do.  She really knows how to work with visual media on the computer and is an ace at digital scrapbooking.  I am in awe of some of the things she has produced.  I consider myself pretty good on a computer, but Cherie is out of my league.  I thank God every day that she fell in love with me.  But that is another long story in itself.  Let’s just say that I don’t play the lottery because I already hit it.  So if you love the new look, the credit is all hers.  If you don’t, then I probably gave her bad instructions.  ;-)

See you tomorrow!


-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Evolution of a Writer - Chapter 4

Image courtesy of Fir0002/Flagstaffotos via Wikimedia.

Chapter 4

Certain memories can get pretty fuzzy over time and that is the case with my second manuscript.  Somewhere around the early-2000s I realized I wanted to pick up my writing again.  The problem was I could not figure out how to make the storyline of my first novel work.  So I decided to set it aside and try a simpler story.  So I went to work on a modern- day murder/thriller.  But I had learned from my first foray and began with a couple of page synopsis.  I toyed around with it until I had what I thought would be a good plot and then did some character sketches. 

It dawned on me that I needed a roadmap to follow.  So I decided to put together an outline I could use as a guide before I started writing the actual draft.   I wrote a description of each scene I intended to write and pieced the story together.  I numbered each one and when I was done I had a skeleton of my story.  This accomplished two things.  It gave me an easy way to keep track of each scene in my first draft as I wrote them and it allowed me to skip around and write particular scenes without losing my place in the story.  For me, this turned out to be the part of the process I was desperately lacking to make my first draft process work. 

Now that I had a process figured out, I set about writing my first draft.  I made fairly rapid progress on the manuscript and was really happy with the story.  I set a goal of finishing the manuscript by the end of the year. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to happen then.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was slowly sliding into a deep depression.  Like the proverbial frog in a pot of water with the heat being slowly turned up, I had no idea how bad things were getting.  It would be five long years before I hit rock bottom.  In that time, neither writing nor anything else – with the exception of my children – provided any solace for me.  In fact, the word depression wouldn’t even be first used by me until after it was over.

Next, it is always darkest before the dawn, but you just never know what might be around the next corner if you keep the faith.

-Chad


Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Quote: Ray Charles

"I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water."



-Ray Charles, 1930-2004, American musician


Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Evolution of a writer - Chapter 3

Click here to read Chapter 1, Chapter 2.

Chapter 3

Life leads you to many places, some of which you never navigate towards – you just end up there.  In 1999, my life took an unexpected turn.  The stress of work had left me physically run down.  I needed a release for my stress, but I really didn’t have any idea how to do it and drugs were something I avoided.  So one day, feeling very stressed out, I went for a walk.  The walk seemed to help.  It cleared my head and enjoyed being out in nature.  I did this for a few weeks, until one day I decided to try running.  I had been walking a three-mile loop around the neighborhood I lived in.  So I knew how far one mile was.  I took off like a rabbit.  Ok, a dog.  A turtle?  Alright, already…it was pretty slug-like.  And genius that I am, I alternately ran and walked the entire mile, only to find myself exhausted and a full mile from home.  Oops.  That was one miserable walk back to the house and I felt like I had been mugged for the rest of the day.  

Those were my first steps as a runner.  But the crazier thing was that, the very next day, I went out and did it again.  Over the next 8 years I would translate that one mile into many thousands of miles, including competing in over 130 running and triathlon races including three marathons, one ultramarathon and two half-ironman triathlons.  But what does this have to do with writing?  Well, throughout it all I decided to share my experiences with other like-minded individuals. 

So I created a blog titled Chad in the Arizona Desert.  It began as a way to share information and experiences with other runners and triathletes, but subconsciously it was also a way for me to not only write, but have an audience for my writing.  I would like to believe that the blog was a success.  I gained a lot of readers and several friends around the world who I still communicate with to this day.  It also gave me confidence that I could write things that other people enjoyed.  I learned a lot from that blog. 

However, due to a series of injuries, I was forced to stop running altogether.  In addition, there were serious storm clouds on the horizon of my life that were threatening to overwhelm me.  The end of the Chad in the Arizona Desert blog was also the beginning of the end of a major chapter of my life.  I just didn’t know it yet.

Next, a new writing idea strikes me just as the rest of my life begins to unravel.

-Chad


Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Evolution of a writer - Chapter 2

Click here to read Chapter 1.

Chapter 2

My first foray into writing a novel began in the winter of 1996.  There was no epiphany; no life changing event that triggered it.  It was really no more complicated than I just sat down one day with the idea for a science-fiction novel and began putting pen to paper.  Frankly I think my life had become mundane.  College was over.  The day-in/day-out of the working life got boring quickly.  I needed something to challenge myself and writing a novel seemed like a challenge.  I had no idea what I was getting into.

For the first year, I pretty much focused on the first chapter.  Yes, you read that correctly, I spent A YEAR on the first chapter.  I felt like I needed to polish and polish and polish until it was perfect.  I believed that if I didn’t get the first chapter right, it would cause the subsequent chapters to suffer.  If that first chapter didn’t capture the reader, they would never even bother with the rest of the book.  I became paralyzed and just couldn’t move on.  Needless to say, I really had no idea what I was doing.  It took a while, but eventually I came to understand that if I was ever going to get anywhere I needed to push forward and get a first draft on paper, then go back and revise until it was “perfect.” 

In the meantime, I moved from my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania to its complete antithesis – Phoenix, Arizona.  I changed jobs, bought a house and eventually had children.  During that time the manuscript would get moved around, worked on for a time, put away for a time, but I never let go of it and kept plugging along.  So, on and off over the course of the next 8 years, I wrote close to 300 pages worth of manuscript for my science fiction epic.  Then it happened.  I realized I had no idea where the story was going to end up.  I had never written out the plot or an outline or anything.  I was just discovering the story as I went.  I really enjoyed the writing, but when I hit the wall and couldn’t figure out where the story was supposed to go next, I became frustrated and gave up.   I put the manuscript in a box unfinished and tried to forget about the whole thing.  But my need to write hadn’t gone away, and without that novel, I needed another outlet for it. 

Next, blogging becomes the outlet – the birth of Chad in the Arizona Desert.

-Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Wordless Wednesday: Great Fountain Geyser

The Great Fountain Geyser erupting at sunset at the Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, United States.


Photo courtesy of user: flicka via Wikimedia Commons.

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Quote: James Hetfield

"I choose to live, not just exist."

-James Hetfield, musician

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.

Evolution of a writer - Chapter 1

My wife Cherie and I have been enjoying a truly beautiful weekend these last two days.  The weather has been mostly sunny with high temperatures in the low to mid 70s.  This is extraordinary given that we live on the shores of Lake Erie and the calendar says something about it being the middle of March.  Traditionally, this time of year along America’s North Coast is a mix of cold rain and colder snow.  But this has been one of the mildest winters I can ever remember and this trend continues with continued gorgeous weather.  We have used it to our advantage getting a lot of things taken care of around the house.  It has also me to make some real progress on my writing.

As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, the primary focus of this blog is to talk about my writing projects, so I suppose this is as good a time as any to start down that path.  But if I am going to talk about my writing, I really feel I should begin at the beginning.   So here is the backstory…

I have loved books and writing as far back as I can remember.  My wonderful mother says she was reading to me before I was born and our home was always filled with books.  Even so, I struggled mightily in grade school and middle school with English.  I have never really grasped all of the technical points.  To this day, I can’t really tell you with any sort of conviction the difference between a present participle and a possessive pronoun.  Also, my spelling leaves a lot to be desired.  Later in life I found that my brain stores words away phonetically.  However, while I can’t diagram a sentence, I know what good writing sounds like.  This is probably from the sheer volume of reading I did at an early age.  In spite of my difficulties early on in my education with English, something interesting happened once I reached high school.  English stopped being so much about the technical aspects of writing and more about comprehension and the actual act of writing.  I came to find out that this was more up my alley.  By the time I graduated from high school, English was one of my best and favorite subjects. 

But there was a sticking point when I reached college.  At that time my real focus was on golf.  I was on an athletic scholarship and I knew that I was going to be spreading myself pretty thin with academics and athletics.  At that point in my life, I still had not made the leap into actually believing I could ever be a writer.  Math came very easy to me so I took the pragmatic approach and majored in accounting for the simple reason that there were lots of jobs out there that paid well.  Do I regret that decision?  Not really.  I make a good living doing it and I never would have met Cherie if I hadn’t.  But there was a critical downside to being a business major.  The little bit of writing that needed to be done had to be both technical and lifeless.  If you have ever read any of the Federal Tax Code, you will immediately understand that from a writer’s point of view, I was the lone gladiator inside the coliseum filled with lions.  On many occasions I found myself at odds with professors who wanted me to write like I no longer had a soul.  This frustrated me to the point that throughout the rest of my college years, I really dreaded to write. 

Eventually I graduated, found an accounting job and settled down.  However, while accounting does a good job of paying the bills, there has always been an itch that I couldn’t quite scratch.  My imagination is always generating these intricate stories in my head and I didn’t have any kind of outlet for them.  They just spun around up there, gathering details only to get filed away with all of the other stories.  It wasn’t until I was out of college and out in the workforce that the first glimmers of what would become my desire to be a writer and tell these stories first began to take a genuine form. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  And yes, I’m going to leave you hanging a bit.  I will be continuing my story in upcoming posts.  I hope you will come along for the ride, because at the finish line will be where I am currently at with my writing and where I intend to go from here. 

Stay tuned friends!

- Chad

Copyright © 2012 by Chad Aaron Sayban. All rights reserved.