(Click the post title to read the submission.)

(Click the post title to read the submission.)

Stupid summer.  Terrible nasty warm summer all over the place. 

Anyway it’s pretty much all over, all six weeks of summer that is/was, this being Canada:  so now what?  Everything is different again on the site; and again, I still can’t figure out how to post.

Mph.

Lemme know!

The story so far.

I joined the Air Force in 1999 as a Spanish Linguist. I spent the majority of my enlistment listening to cell phone calls, and happened to be away from my office at the Pentagon on the day the plane crashed in 2001. I was determined to distance myself from the military and left in 2003. Shortly thereafter, a friend of mine was killed in Iraq and I decided that I needed to “get back in the fight.” I joined the Iraq Survey Group, the organization created by the President to find the weapons of mass destruction, where I was responsible for reviewing and analyzing torture tapes. After about a year and a half, I finally realized, along with the rest of the world, that the presence of such weapons was a lie, and quickly resigned. A year after coming home the idea of having my emails home from the Middle East published as a memoir arose. My first book, Somewhere in the Middle, was published by Sybaritic Press in March 2006.

So I here I am.

Following the first book, a lot of the feedback I received from readers was that they felt that there was more to my story. They were right. A lot of unique experiences have shaped me into the writer that decided that it was a good idea to go sit alone in the desert and write about it. I wrote finished a second book and am pitching it as Particularly Evil. Particularly Evil is the retelling of my life over the past eight or so years. It explains how a person will go to any length chasing affection and admiration and, usually, come up short. The story begins while I’m sitting in the military’s version of rehab just after September 11th after having post traumatic stress disorder misdiagnosed as alcoholism, and continues to explain the distance I felt during my final year in the Air Force. Coming home, I search for a purpose and lose a friend and decide that I need to be thrown into the breach, thinking that even if I were to die I’ll at least be remembered fondly for doing something noble. I explain in detail what it’s like to be alone in the desert, missing home and having to watch tapes of torture and then realizing that the reason I came isn’t as noble as I was led to believe. I write about coming home and adjusting and how a random introduction in a bar leads to me becoming a published author. I go into excruciating detail about failed relationships that were doomed the moment I began answering Internet personal ads, and provide the reader with an in-depth description of what it’s like to become a member of the Moped Army, one of America’s rising counter-cultures, whose popularity continues to soar right along with the price of gas. The story ends along with the last doomed relationship, and is followed by a scathing epilogue. Between each story there are short “origin passages” that reflect on important, traumatic events from my upbringing with abusive parents. The effect is that there are two stories running together that lend to each other. By the book’s end, the reader not only has an idea of what has happened and how I acted; they also have gleaned an idea of why I may have acted that way from the origin passages.

Apologies for the length. The above is basically the query I’ve sent out over and over the past six months, as I’m not interested in doing another with my current publisher. It’s rough. I’ve been slacking on writing anything lately and thought this site looked like a place that might motivate me. I’ve done a bit of time on Urbis, and am pretty worn on it, so I thought I’d try something new.

Thanks for having me.

(Click the post title to read the submission.)

What can we do about this besides answer the RFC?

(Click the post title to read the submission.)

(Click the post title to read the submission.)