As I am writ­ing part three now I real­ize how much I do love writ­ing. There is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between know­ing and under­stand­ing and it can take quite a while before one turns into the other. Despite major lapses and set­back I keep on writ­ing, in one for or another.

In the pre­vi­ous post I’ve left off in 1997. Con­tin­u­ing on to 1998 writ­ing once more became a major part of my life as I met my future wife Holly. Our rela­tion­ship lit­er­ally grew page upon page as we sent lengthy emails to each other — day after day. We have print­outs of many of those mes­sages and they num­ber into the hun­dreds. As a result my Eng­lish skills dras­ti­cally improved which in turn fos­tered our rela­tion­ship. Fast for­ward to 2001 and my move to Amer­ica. As men­tioned prior with that also came a long lost sense of adven­ture and new which quickly rekin­dled my desire to write. I pitched a few arti­cles to local news­pa­pers but was briskly turned down. Worse, my ideas were taken and handed over to in-house writ­ers. That was my first foray into US pub­lish­ing, decid­edly very dif­fer­ent from my expe­ri­ences back in Ger­many (where I was given oppor­tu­ni­ties from the get-go). Nev­er­the­less, I had brought sev­eral of my old arti­cles with me and began trans­lat­ing them into Eng­lish. I also started work­ing for var­i­ous trans­la­tion (or inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion) com­pa­nies and for a short period of time even found my way back in to the video game indus­try as an edi­tor of Ger­man trans­la­tions for var­i­ous games and offi­cial websites.

Even­tu­ally I cre­ated Alternate:Words. At first it served sim­ply as a port­fo­lio of my pre­vi­ous arti­cles and as a means of offer­ing writ­ing and edit­ing ser­vices. How­ever, oppor­tu­ni­ties kept open­ing up in other areas thus I returned to the IT world once more (with a tremen­dously suc­cess­ful expe­ri­ence nev­er­the­less). Dur­ing that time I kept Alternate:Words alive and even­tu­ally some­thing I longed for years ear­lier became a real­ity when blogs appeared. I installed the first ver­sion of Word­Press but didn’t really do much with it until I pub­lished my “Infil­tra­tor”? CD (called a “Music­novel”?) and began post­ing about air­play and reviews of it. After some time I felt I was not really tak­ing advan­tage of the for­mat turned Alternate:Words into what it is today — or was sup­posed to be. If you’ve fol­lowed along over the years you may have seen short sto­ries appear,and dis­ap­pear again, var­i­ous forms of poetry styles posted as well as occa­sional mus­ings. At first I posted quite reg­u­larly, if you look through the archives there are barely any gaps — except for posts I’ve move to other blogs rea­son­ing they’d be bet­ter suited on their own blogs. Thus Fab­ula Bre­vis came and went, a blog I ini­tially filled with short sto­ries and flash fic­tion. Cog­nizant Dreamer has come, and gone again, which was the same con­cept under a more poignant name. I even started a blog for another novel idea I’ve con­ceived the past few years — Lucian the Seeker. And then there is Cin­e­matic Toys meant for post­ings about my toy pho­tog­ra­phy — also in dire need of any updates.

Of course I only shared the most rel­e­vant bits of what has hap­pened over the years and the ques­tion now stands as to why my dream of writ­ing a novel has not pro­gressed much, aside from respon­si­bil­i­ties demand­ing their dues. That leads me back to the begin­ning of this series of posts and the ques­tion of what was the moti­va­tion for that dream? For me the moti­va­tion back then was and still is the desire to explore, to uncover the extra­or­di­nary behind the ordi­nary, the vast realm of imagination.But truth be told I am not a novel reader. In all hon­esty most nov­els sim­ply bore me. I’d say that many decent nov­els would make great short sto­ries as they tend to get lost in details ans lose pace and focus. And that’s the key for my future endeavors.

I grew up read­ing mostly short sto­ries (I actu­ally have read less then two dozen full length nov­els my whole life), watch­ing episodes on TV and lis­ten­ing to 60 minute sto­ries on tape. Maybe a case for ADD could be made, I cer­tainly had the signs grow­ing up, but I’d argue that this is what I really enjoy. And there is that lit­tle impor­tant word — joy. It’s not just fun, it’s joy. And with that joy comes love. I love writ­ing, but what­ever I write is done in a pur­suit of well paced prose and care­fully cho­sen words. I don’t like waste, least to waste time.

Now the ques­tion is what to make of it all? When I wrote arti­cles and saw them in print after­ward there was a sense of pride, of accom­plish­ment, of con­tent. As I said in the pre­ced­ing post when I was first exposed to the web I was quite neg­a­tive about it. While my over­all dis­po­si­tion has changed, as a writer I am still reluc­tant. Sure, there are plenty of exam­ples of suc­cess­ful web writ­ers out there (my wife being one of them), but for me as some­one who is more of an observer than an approacher I find it not only dif­fi­cult but also demo­ti­vat­ing to sim­ply push my work out to a global audi­ence with­out a cer­tain reward. Of course obsta­cles are there to be over­come but an hon­est eval­u­a­tion of one’s per­son­al­ity has to come into play as well.

Con­sid­er­ing what I shared to this point I con­cluded that my dream was in need of evolv­ing. What was sim­ply a child’s dream has to be con­sid­ered in light of advances in pub­lish­ing as well as a clearer under­stand­ing of what I enjoy and love. I am now con­sid­er­ing e-publishing fore­most and am work­ing on a con­cept for a series of short sto­ries, or episodes as I call them. Every story idea I’ve devel­oped to this point is pre­des­tined to be episodic, from my orig­i­nal sci­ence fic­tion story to my recent steampunk(ish) project all the way to my “Infil­tra­tor”? music­novel. I’ve also talked about my love of music before so I con­sider com­bin­ing episodes with specif­i­cally writ­ten com­po­si­tions. Adding in a few illus­tra­tions shall round out the whole con­cept. And of course I’d very much enjoy writ­ing arti­cles for (paper) mag­a­zines again. That is the goal, that is the dream once held evolved and brought from the past to the present.

What about Alternate:Words? It has a small audi­ence and that is enough for me to keep post­ing on it, how reg­u­larly only time will tell. Part of the prob­lem has been that I’ve quite lit­er­ally writ­ten myself into a cor­ner. I enjoy pho­tog­ra­phy a lot but I had made it a rule to only post if I had an image avail­able. I am aban­don­ing this rule. There may be posts with­out images in the future. There’ll prob­a­bly be less haikus as they were often the result of the “image needed”? rule. I still write poetry but it’s about prose more than it is about meter when I write. And while con­sis­tency is great it must be in sup­port and not in com­pe­ti­tion with the actual goal. And of course what­ever may be use­ful and encour­ag­ing to other writ­ers and cre­atives I’ll keep post­ing here as well.

Do you maybe feel that a long held dream has some­how been stuck in time? Take a few moments, days, weeks and ana­lyze what the under­ly­ing love is that formed that dream. Maybe your dream is in need of evolv­ing as well. And then put it out there.