Before head­ing into this post I rec­om­mend read­ing part one of “Love, Pas­sion and Cre­ativ­ity”, if you haven’t already done so, as I’ve laid the foun­da­tion in that post for what’s to follow.

Time is a curi­ous thing. I’ve writ­ten about it before but I want to men­tion it here again in the con­text of this post. Time acts reverse pro­por­tional to our age, mean­ing to chil­dren days can feel extremely long but the older we get the shorter those same days feel until we hit a point where we fre­quently seem to say “time flies”. It’s sim­ply a mat­ter of per­cep­tion and the fact that over the years we accu­mu­late expe­ri­ences (been there, done that) thus it may lose our sense of excite­ment and dis­cov­ery. I expe­ri­enced this myself and even with my own blog. Alternate:Words started out in 2002 as sim­ply a web­site to pro­mote my writ­ing. A year prior I’ve had moved to the US and while my Eng­lish was still improv­ing I was feel­ing a sense of new and excite­ment and I felt inspired to write for mag­a­zines — again.

Rewind a sev­eral years to 1995. My child­hood dream of writ­ing had still been very much alive. In fact I’ve picked up my sci­ence fic­tion story again and started over by writ­ing a new out­line and some tech­ni­cal ref­er­ences. Through­out the years prior I’ve had talked about my ideas to my friends and one of my best friends had even cre­ated sev­eral con­cept draw­ings. I again looked into pub­lish­ing, from tra­di­tional to self pub­lish­ing. The only prob­lem was that “real­ity” was firmly estab­lished in my life now. I needed to make a liv­ing. Of course there were var­i­ous options, espe­cially in the IT indus­try. I worked as a sys­tem and net­work admin­is­tra­tor for BMW in the early PC days, then switched to the more cre­ative side by work­ing for graphic design firms cre­at­ing logos, fly­ers and even web­sites. As inter­est­ing as these projects were I felt I was get­ting fur­ther and fur­ther away from my writ­ing dream.

Even­tu­ally I decided to pitch some arti­cles to var­i­ous mag­a­zines con­cern­ing inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment (or sim­ply video games), music soft­ware and graphic design soft­ware. Once I put my mind to some­thing I am extremely dri­ven and deter­mined and it only took a few weeks before I had my first assign­ments. Over the fol­low­ing two years I built an exten­sive net­work of press con­tacts, liaisons and mag­a­zine edi­tors that enabled me to not only delve deeper into the world of inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling but also fos­ter my own writing.

While there are numer­ous nov­els pub­lished in Ger­many each year by Ger­man authors the mar­ket is of course rather lim­ited. At that point I had a key con­ver­sa­tion with a game designer who was also writ­ing nov­els based on the games his com­pany devel­oped (some­thing unheard of back then and com­mon­place now). His con­clu­sion was that if you don’t have an Eng­lish pen name and don’t write in Eng­lish you won’t get far. He sounded quite frus­trated at that point and even­tu­ally turned his back on the whole indus­try as well as writ­ing. Con­sid­er­ing the vast quan­tity of trans­lated US/UK lit­er­a­ture in Ger­man book­stores his obser­va­tion made sense. How­ever, at that time my Eng­lish was rather rudi­men­tary. I didn’t par­tic­u­larly liked tak­ing Eng­lish in high school even though I had a very enthu­si­as­tic teacher. I sim­ply had no inter­est and it showed. In fact I was encour­aged to skip French and solely focus on Eng­lish, some­thing only sug­gested to stu­dents who are severely “lacking”.

What sounded like a road­block actu­ally encour­aged me to push for­ward. I started to seek out native Eng­lish speak­ers and was deter­mined to learn the lan­guage. And what bet­ter place then the emerg­ing Inter­net, right? Well, truth be told I couldn’t really care less at first. Quite the oppo­site, I felt uncom­fort­able about the web, almost threat­ened. Which was odd con­sid­er­ing the movie Tron had left a major impres­sion on me dur­ing child­hood. I bought my first com­puter because of it (when I was twelve years old), learned pro­gram­ming, became fas­ci­nated with video games and even cre­ated some com­puter ani­ma­tions in later years. Maybe sub­con­sciously I feared that the web would neg­a­tively impact pub­lish­ing and there­fore threaten my dreams.

That resis­tance cer­tainly didn’t last long (after all I was just in my mid twen­ties). Curios­ity won and I bough my first modem, hor­ri­bly slow and prone to drop-outs, which came bun­dled with AOL. Aside from the ridicu­lous cost involved (phone charges by the minute plus ISP charges by the minute plus base fee) a whole new world lit­er­ally opened up (one that even­tu­ally lead to find­ing my lovely wife years later). Hence­forth I emailed my arti­cles to my pub­lish­ers (instead of mail­ing them on floppy disks) and even­tu­ally estab­lished my very own web mag­a­zine in 1997 called PCIn­former. Back then every new arti­cle had to be added to the HTML code of the main page and then uploaded to the server. I quickly longed for some type of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem which was still years off, at least for non-commercial users. But, being my own pub­lisher aside from hav­ing estab­lished columns in mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers I felt I had reached an impor­tant mile­stone on my jour­ney as a writer. There is a deep sat­is­fac­tion that comes from reach­ing goals against odds.

Unfor­tu­nately the odds turned against me as a major mag­a­zine dying swept through Ger­many in 1997 and within a four week time span I lost all my con­tracts. Due to a lack of options (since I was writ­ing in Ger­man) I tried des­per­ately to find new writ­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, includ­ing pro­duc­ing arti­cles for emerg­ing web por­tals. But the con­tent needed fell out­side my exper­tise and the pay was mar­ginal. Ulti­mately finan­cial oblig­a­tions forced me to recon­sider. It was a major blow to my dream, and my con­fi­dence. The last thing I was con­cerned with now was writ­ing a novel. So I went back to the IT world, my cre­ativ­ity squarely tucked away in a dark cor­ners of my mind.

Have you expe­ri­enced any major set­backs, maybe to the degree where you felt you had to aban­don your dreams forever?

So there’s been a lapse again on Alternate:Words. What was once intended to be a reg­u­lar per­sonal blog filled with cre­ative writ­ings has turned into skip­ping entire months with­out updates. It was time for me to take a deeper look at the reason(s) for this and what I have to share may be help­ful to other strug­gling writ­ers. This will be a bit lengthy so I am split­ting it into two parts.

Much of what we enjoy as adults is rooted in our child­hood. This sense of “new”, of wide eyed won­ders, of the world being a play­ground full of adven­ture and excite­ment, of secret doors to hid­den worlds, of the ordi­nary sim­ply being a dis­guise of the extra­or­di­nary — all the things gen­er­ally rel­e­gated as child’s play — is some­thing we seem to lose over the years as “real­ity” sets in. We are increas­ingly con­fronted with weighty deci­sions, often forced upon us, with respon­si­bil­i­ties we must take on and the seem­ingly unavoid­able loss of inno­cence. For a grow­ing child every day is a new expe­ri­ence, every day holds the promise of some new dis­cov­ery, learn­ing about itself and the world it is sur­rounded by while being in the care of lov­ing par­ents (or a parent).

Of course there is the other side that shapes us as well, the dis­ap­point­ments, the pain of loss — be it a beloved pet or a tragic event like the death of a close rel­a­tive, the first signs of par­ents not being gods and at times strug­gling to make the right deci­sions. But even dur­ing these times there are dis­trac­tions avail­able, worlds to be dis­cov­ered and explored, be it through books (writ­ten and audio), music, movies and video games. I inten­tion­ally put that list in order of accepted forms of child­hood enter­tain­ment from ben­e­fi­cial to ques­tion­able. I grew up with all four and cher­ish them equally (there is as much “bad” lit­er­a­ture as there are “awful” video games, it’s really a mat­ter of parental supervision).

I always enjoyed explor­ing and inves­ti­gat­ing. Thus my favorite types of sto­ries grow­ing up were detec­tive sto­ries, be it Three Detec­tives, Famous Five or books of short sto­ries writ­ten by Wolf­gang Ecke (here’s an exam­ple), each open at the end for the reader to solve who did it. Much of my story intake actu­ally hap­pened through tapes and records, the early form of audio books called “Hör­spiel“ in Ger­man, the clos­est approx­i­ma­tion in Eng­lish being audio or radio drama. I had lots of them and I lis­tened to them over and over. And then there were TV shows like Columbo, Hart to Hart, Scare­crow and Mrs. King or Rem­ing­ton Steele (to name but a few). I always watched them with my grand­mother who enjoyed them equally as much as I did. And Star Trek. She liked Cap­tain Kirk (“he’s hand­some”) but not really Cap­tain Picard (“he’s not very good look­ing”). We also watched Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, Buck Rogers and Flash Gor­don together. I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house since my mother had to work dur­ing the day to make ends meet (my par­ents divorced when I was five).