Damn. This place has collected dust.

An absence like this calls for an introduction. Because you’re not who you were last time we talked. And I’m not who I was last time I blinked.

My name is Dave. I’m a writer. I don’t write the stuff I want to write, but I write the stuff that helps pay the bills. And that’s been cool for a while.

I don’t think that’s cool anymore.

Allow me an aside. Or a flashback. Or a derail. Call it what you want. I think when I pull it back around, you’ll know me a little. And you’ll get where I’m planning to take this blog. And you’ll be safely on your way to the exits, if you like.

I grew up in Berkshire County, the tree-covered edge of Massachusetts that borders New York. Suburbia was a rumor. Our trips to the grocery store were straight out of Oregon Trail. I spent grade school in a little two-room basement of a Baptist church, taught by my mother and a rotation of intrepid souls. You could call it a home school and I wouldn’t fault you. We didn’t, but what did we know? We were home schooled.

Some days, my mom would stay late at school to grade papers. I walked into town to wait for her at the public library. Yes, I was 10. Yes, the library was about two miles away. You didn’t believe me when I said I grew up in the sticks, huh? Believe it. That library – the Lee Library if you’re scoring at home (or even if you’re alone) – was where I met Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Orson Scott Card. You would have picked classic literature when you were 10? Shut up. This ain’t your story.

Don’t think I just dropped that “Baptist” thing in there for nothing. I was raised so Baptist my parents wouldn’t admit they were Baptist. I come from the “We believe the Bible” school of Protestantism, the kind that thinks academics are snooty troublemakers and other denominations are probably Satanists. They’ve stared secular skepticism right in the eye and returned it tenfold. Rick Perry would have been very popular in the crowd I grew up in.

So there I was. 10 years old. Nose buried in the Bible every Sunday and in Ender’s Game every afternoon. It wasn’t long before Ender’s Game turned into The Stand. I asked for a copy for Christmas when I was 12. My dad flew off the handle, and there I was, cognitive dissonance all over my face. I knew The Stand was just a story, but here were my parents treating it like it was much, much more. The way they treated the Bible.

That’s when it all unraveled.

I tried to hold it together. I spent my summers during high school as a counselor at a Protestant camp. I went to a Baptist college, where I studied English literature and tried not to get expelled for skipping chapel and listening to unwholesome music. I prayed and cried and begged, but I felt like I could see the wires. The illusion was shattered. I clung to the traditions I grew up in because they were my culture. They mattered to me because they mattered to the people I loved. But they were just stories. And the people I loved didn’t love my stories. And so I didn’t want to love theirs.

And we’re back.

I’m not 12 anymore. Hell, I’m not 30 anymore. And those stories that I shunned for being nothing but stories still tickle the back of my brain. As a child, my world was undone when I recognized that the stories my parents loved were just as untrue as the stories I loved. As an avid reader and storyteller, I couldn’t accept the illusion. But stories only truly exist in the space between the teller and the listener. If the listener is cynical, the teller can’t get a word in. If the listener is gullible, any story will do. But if the story is good and the listener is engaged, whether or not the story is true couldn’t be less relevant.

I’m wrestling with what story is. And what a storyteller is. And what kind of storyteller I can be. I can’t be an honest broker unless I take some stabs at the stories I was told in my formative years. What those stories mean to me, and what that means to me as a storyteller – well, stick around. I’ve got more stories to tell.

It’s all about Warcraft.

Since last September, I’ve been writing a movie column for 411mania.com. Perhaps you’ve read it. It was a blast to work on – if nothing else, it was a hell of a convenient excuse to load up my Netflix queue and roll around in all the awesome. I caught some flack for working free from well-intentioned friends (including the one who lives in my head, especially when paying work was kicking my ass), but they didn’t know what I knew. This wasn’t work. This was a free self-help course.

A long, long time ago, around 1995, back when I was a fresh-faced college student, I fell in with a group of deviants who spent their weekends playing Warcraft. Not World of Warcraft. Warcraft. Ozzy Osbourne may have been the prince of darkness since 1979, but I’ve been playing Warcraft since it ran on DOS. The games were always bloodbaths, but that special, plodding, slow kind of bloodbath that only an early-90s PC game can be. There are a few strategies you can employ in a game like Warcraft. You can pump out troops and go running head first into a fight. You can do that because you are calm and rational. Not me. I get frantic. I build. And dig in. And build more. And dig in more. And once I’m absolutely sure that my base won’t crumble at the hands of the inevitable counterattack by my enemy’s unseen but obviously superior forces, I poke my head out and see what’s out there. (This, incidentally, is why I absolutely suck at Warcraft III, which rewards the exact opposite style of play – which makes sense, because my style is boring as hell.) And almost every single time, once I found the other guy’s base, I’d roll him over in minutes.

This was how I learned that I do my best work when I run scared.

When you’re working on a fiction project in your spare time, you don’t run scared. There’s no pressure to finish it. In fact, pressure runs the opposite way, pushing you to focus on paying work, or dirty dishes, or unfolded laundry. A weekly column, though – there’s pressure in that. There might not be cashy money or hygiene or the lives of your orc horde on the line, but there are readers and a deadline, two things that hate being disappointed. So I looked for a weekly writing gig, and 411mania.com came through beyond my expectations by offering me a weekly slot that I could fill however I liked.

I chose a format that I thought would be fun to write and to read, but I made sure it had a trap door. I wrote about the best movies from each year of my life, meaning that, barring some drastic change in the time-space continuum or a robotic uprising, there could only be around thirty-three columns. I put together a short list of movies for each year and overloaded my Netflix queue, but despite plans to get ahead, most weekends involved crazed movie-viewing marathons followed by equally crazed writing marathons. By the time Tuesday rolled around and the column went live, I was pretty much done writing until Friday, when it was time to rinse and repeat. I realized pretty quickly that I could keep up with the column if I worked at it, but it was all I could keep up (besides work and family, natch). So when I hit 2008 (the delightful Wall-E), it was decision time. Do I loop back around and do it all again and again, concentrating on a different genre each time, or do I stop? If I started a new cycle, I’d be delaying my own writing at least another eight months. Hit or stay?

I also like to live dangerously. So I stopped. And I was convinced I’d made a horrible mistake.

After a week of letting my mind lie fallow, little sprouts started popping up. Story ideas that I put on the back burner months (sometimes years) ago were coming back to me, and they were triggering all kinds of new associations. I didn’t know this would happen. In fact, I was terrified it wouldn’t. That’s the beautiful, infuriating, frustrating, addictive part about writing – between feverish brainstorming and writing, it feels like no good idea will ever come again. Until it does.

All that to say this. I stopped writing my movie column because writing my movie column had done its job. I got myself back into good writing habits, and if you read my column even once, I owe that to you. You terrified me and forced me to get my Ass In Chair and write. I hope I entertained, amused, or pissed you off in all the right ways while I did it. I’m back in the honeymoon phase on my fiction. I’ve been here before, and it’s a lot of fun, but it doesn’t last. But this time, I have my secret weapon – discipline inspired by nearly 40 weeks of stark, raving terror that I would disappoint you. Which is way worse than getting your town hall smashed by a daemon.