Ten years ago, I ran away from home. I didn’t actually sleep on the streets when I was homeless. I never made a little newspaper tent or pushed around a shopping cart. If I had no place to flop for the night, I would be too scared to sleep, so I would stay awake all night, ride buses, or hang out under the single yellow light bulb over the back entrance to the public library, as if I just had a book that was urgently overdue and required me to wait all night to return it the very second the library opened at 10 am. Sometimes I stayed at homeless shelters. Mostly I crashed with friends.
Kids run away from home for many good reasons, but I wasn’t a kid, and my reason was ludicrous. True, my mom and I had a fundamental disagreement. I wanted to write novels for a living, and I was prepared to do whatever I needed to do to achieve my dream, especially if it involved sponging off my mom and writing all day on a glass veranda that opened onto a swimming pool. My mom thought I should stop being such a frickin’ mooch, go get a real job and write as a hobby, like a sane human being. She warned me that if I tried to have a career as a writer, I would probably just end up homeless and penniless, living on the streets. She convinced me to leverage my BA into a credential to do substitute teaching. Every morning, around five AM, I dragged myself to the phone. If it rang, it meant I had to drive to some junior high school and sit through a melee of pubescent mayhem while I wrote by hand in my notebook. If the phone didn’t ring, it meant I could stay home and write on a computer by the backyard pool. Sometimes at 4:56, I took the phone off the hook.
My mom nagged me to earn a Master’s in Education, so I could enjoy pubescent hormones as a steady career. I’m not good at saying no to my mom, so I kept promising to think about it, all the while secretly promising myself I would publish a breakout novel instead, something that would earn enough money I would be justified in writing full time. I knew it would be hard because in junior high and high school, I’d already written several novels, all awful. Then, in my late teens, I spent another five years writing a 400,000 word fantasy epic, The Games of Dragon Island: Book One of Avatars of the Archons, which I submitted to DAW when I was nineteen. I didn’t know anything about agents. Writing wasn’t a business to me; it wasn’t even an art. It was just an after-effect of being alive. You were alive, so you wrote. If you stopped writing, you would die, and also, the sun would probably go out because you hadn’t sacrificed your heart to it.
Peter Stampfel returned my doorstop to me with a nice personalized rejection, saying thanks but they weren’t publishing any books with reincarnation at the moment, there were too many Wheel of Time imitators. Again, I was too green to realize how kind it was of him to write me a personal note. (So Peter, on the off chance you ever read this: You rock. And your banjo music rocks. Thanks.) That same year, I didn’t get into college because my grades in high school sucked. Let’s agree it was a despondent moment and move on.
I did three things. I bummed around Europe for a while, on the pretext of learning French. I attended a Junior College for a semester, earned a 4.0, reapplied to my dream college, and this time was accepted. I also bought the first book in the Wheel of Time series, which I had never read, to see why Peter Stampfel thought my book was imitating it. I didn’t think my book was at all similar, but I did enjoy the book and then the series. There are worse writers to be compared to than Robert Jordan.
I managed to concentrate enough on college to graduate and only once came close to flunking because I was inspired to write a book during finals. I earned better grades than I did in high school, thanks to the notable absence of math in my curriculum. But college only lasts four, or, um, five years, and then you have to either move on and Become An Adult or else hang around your mom’s house a few more years, pretending to be an adult.
The more my mother urged me to become a teacher, the more determined I was that I had to become a professional writer, not just someone who wrote for fun. I learned all about agents, queries, royalties, advances. I began to panic about how long it would take to get published and earn real money at it. I felt guiltier and guiltier that I wasn’t working at a real job. Whole days started to go by where I stared at my computer screen, or class full of rowdy students, and wrote nothing. My mind was frozen. The sun had gone out.
I blamed my mom.
I knew what would happen. I would give in to the voice of reason and common sense and become a teacher. At first, I would write in the evenings, but gradually, work would overwhelm me or drain me. Queries would be sent and rejected. My inspiration would flag. I’d become depressed and self-doubting. I’d say I would write as soon as I had time. But I would have less and less time. The years would go by, and occasionally I would fiddle with my novel, or dash out a short story. But mostly I would just write the stories in my head and never have the chance to polish them.
I decided I would rather be homeless and penniless but free to write than to subside into suburban catatonia. I had no money, no car, no career, no house, no plan. Just a dream.
So I ran away from home to become a writer.
And yeah, ended up homeless and penniless and living on the streets. So it turns out my mom was right all along.
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Several of these stories have had previous homes in small, mostly free, mostly online magazines. A few extracts from novels have put on Groucho Marx glasses and sneaked in masquerading as novelettes. They have never before been published. However, even the stories that were published are no longer available or are difficult to track down. Honestly, some I myself had even forgotten about until I decided to compile this anthology.
I ask all readers to let me know if you find any typos or mistakes, so I can improve future editions.