Control: Starting at the Bottom…

I, Dalton Lewis, need to start over. I will be reborn as the phoenix of legend. I need to restart my writing career. I sit, at home, in front of a computer screen, with soda, water, and Starbucks packages that used to house coffee cakes. I have Warhammer 40k miniatures to put together and paint. I have books to read on the left side of the desk. I will write novels that will impact the world and the people who read them. Writing takes a ridiculous amount of effort, but I can do the work. Quitting drinking — done twelve years ago. Writing most days — done for the last few years. Publishing a blog entry almost every day — done for ten days or so. I’m accomplishing my objectives, and writing the great American novel is next up. I’ll do my absolute best to do that.

I have written a lot of these blog entries, but I have started to write them every day. I want to combine reviews of popular books, movies, and television shows with the day-to-day problems of someone with a debilitating mental illness. I also want to talk about the fucked-up reality of the world around us. I blog about murder sometimes — people need to acknowledge that murders happen in America every day. Half of all murders used to be solved — has that gone up? I don’t know. I just know that people murder people successfully, and a lot. People do a lot of murdering. I need to address that in my blog.

I don’t sleep well. I sit at home, in my room, playing on the computer, until six or eight in the morning, and then I sleep. I try to wake up at two or three pm but can’t. I just collapse, unable to wake up, until I have slept twelve hours. Taking my nighttime pills becomes the hardest task of my day. I understand how people stop taking their meds — it takes enormous willpower to take a pill that will knock me out for twelve hours. These last few days have been better, though, because I haven’t slept as much. I attribute this to taking a walk or exercising every other day.

Writing reviews means I evaluate the quality of the work — and some works aren’t perfect, and it’s mean to call a work of art poor in quality. I want to review works by showing what the works tried to say instead of trying to critique it by saying it’s poor.

It has been a week of blogging so far, and I think that people have responded. I have over 100 views for the month so far and think that I am delighted at the response. I am starting a number of new books, including a genre fantasy novel. I want to write a work of literature instead of something with pulp and conventional good guys fighting bad guys.

I was going to write a novel about middle school because of how awful middle school can be. It ended up being something that couldn’t work because I don’t want to show all those horrors and embarrass and humiliate the reader and the characters. Instead I want to write a fantasy novel — a big epic about all the things right and wrong about our world, set in a world far away from Earth. I will be reborn as the phoenix of legend and become a good writer — maybe not famous, but a good writer.

Thanks, and take care, friends.