kaolin fire presents :: writing

Writing, like art, is something I've done sporadically since a very young age (like most people, I presume). This impetus was mostly received from my mom, with her english and library science degrees. I remember writing the most horrible drivel (poetry) in fourth grade. It was probably spawned by a class assignment, but my mom was a driving force. We wrote scads and scads of bad poetry [well, I wrote the bad stuff. She's actually pretty talented, and had a couple of years on me at the time ;)]. I also remember writing and illustrating a story for some other class, which won some sort of award at the state level. (The Robot Who Saved Halloween).

I don't remember much creative writing until middle school, when I penned such magnificent things as "Life Sucks and Then You Die" and ... you know, I've forgotten the name of the other one. The other one got me into a creative writing/problem solving course, where I wrote a couple of things and attended a couple of problem solving meets, doing horribly with both. But I was inspired, and I wrote more, and more. Typically lots of ideas for novels, based on myself and my friends, usually dealing with some sort of robot or noir theme.

Fast forward to college and a friend I was sharing stories with hooked me up with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Co-operative (now named "imaginaries"), where their quarterly challenges hooked me. I eventually took the reigns from the founder, managing the members and the website, and generally entered every challenge, occasionally writing things outside of the challenges.

After an aborted attempt with the domain "riddlery.org" to create a poetry version of imaginaries, and a bit of learning, I managed to whip up poemranker, which has become a bit of a success with Yahoo's help (making it site-of-the-day July 7th 2002). Meanwhile, my actual writing has petered off into editing, as I've dedicated a large amount of my "free" time to NFG, a magazine for the promotion of "edgy" interstitial arts. That is, it's a magazine for art (poetry, fiction, comics, visual art, articles) that is unbounded by genre limitations.

Meanwhile meanwhile... I do write some, from time to time. I like to keep track of things I say that I consider interesting (my quotes), the occasional poem or story (though stories are locked behind gate and guard in the hope of eventual publishing), and the one joke I've made up so far that I considered worth saving and sharing. I also spent a year or so doing a lot of introspection, and have most of that archived and hyperlinked under thoughts/rants. Mind you, I've changed a bit since then. Evolved. Devolved. Volved. But they were my thoughts then.

I tend to keep my poetry a little more updated (but a little less organized) on poemranker, where my username is nentwined.

Actually, The Last To Have Sex was published in NFG issue 3, and now that that's off the shelves I feel no remorse in making it completely free. I think. Circumstances may change my mind, so I think I'm going to tell google/whatnot to not cache it. A warning--some people consider it plotless pornography.

And here's one of my earlier pieces that finally found a home a Bewildering Stories -- a bit pulpy, and apparently reminiscent of 'The Lottery'. Yeah, I probably am giving away far too much, there--Testing

And to date, I have one filk, ish, created with a friend.