Welcome To My Mind

This first posting is just to give you a little more insight into me, and the purpose of this blog.

To start with, I'm a writer...I should use the proper descriptive, aspiring, as I've had nothing officially published yet. But I've been learning a great deal in the recent past and would like to start sharing my work and words of wisdom with you to the fullest extent that I can. I'm also always open to any wisdom others can share with me.

I've been writing short stories and some poetry since I was in fourth grade, when I wrote my first piece of poetry. It was some little ditty about a bee. I still laugh when I think back to it.

I looked in the mirror and what did I see?
A big yellow and black bumblebee coming after me

That's all I can remember off the top of my head, but I do remember my classmates at the time taking interest in it and copying it down. Lol if I had only known about copyright infringements at that point!

The next step from there was building up my poetry, getting fairly proficient by the time I hit junior high and puberty. Okay, I admit! I was trying to impress the English teacher. It wasn't my fault she was hot! Those poems eventually evolved into short stories...this time trying to impress my friends and certain sexy young dames. It worked pretty well, I have to say! Well, the interest in the stories anyway. It didn't garner me the 'personal' interest I was hoping for though. Oh well, life sucks sometimes, what can I say? I'm much better with the female species now than I ever was throughout high school.

After a time, I had given up on the writing as my guitar-playing and singing skills evolved, and my penmanship turned to song-writing. I've been a vocalist and rythem guitarist in a few small un-named bands. The songs were great, but the music sucked, if you follow me there. I still have an interest in re-recording a few of my songs and seeing what happens eventually, but right now my sole concentration is on my literary endevours.

As a "loser" in junior high and the first half of high school, naturally my subject matter took on a lot of self-pity, depression, and hostility. Natural par for the course in matters of dark fiction. I could lay a lot of the blame on my dad as well, and I used to. Sooner or later, though, I realized that his holier than thou and you're going to hell when you die if you don't straighten up attitude wasn't meant to be mean and make me out like I was some kind of monster or problem child. It was just his way of attempting to make the man out of me he thought was best for me. Yeah, so he wasn't perfect. Who is?

And in some small way I think he accomplished this, even if it did take me most of my 32 years to figure it out. It's amazing how many things your parents do when you're growing up and you swear to yourself, "I'm never going to be like them!" Next thing you know, every now and then you have an epiphany and realize that hey! They were right after all!

Oh wow, I rambled off there! Okay, back to the subject at hand...

All these aspects that build up when you're grossly unpopular in school, I strongly believe that these are probably some of the biggest factors in what drive a lot of people to become writers of horror and dark fiction. It was certainly what got me into writing it. Sure most everyone likes a good scare story now and then. For most people, that is...even if unconciously...what reminds them that they are alive. Fear of death is the trigger to survival instinct. But what drives a person to WRITE these stories?

I'm sure there are as many answers as there are types of horror stories. But I've notice from experience that for many, if not most, it was the inner fear of not being accepted, and the darkness of being "alone" that being an outcast from the popular world created. What happens, then, is that those of us that lived this began trying to create our own little worlds where we made things happen for us; worlds where we either flourished in this darkness, or were the heroes who vanquished this darkness.

Now don't go stereotyping from this concept, please! This is just a general idea and theory as there are, as I stated previously, many other reasons for many other authors. Hell, I'm even proud to say I was a "loser" in school (well, til my junior year anyway). If it weren't for that, I'd probably sitting behind a desk in a cubicle somewhere, venting my frustrations and expanding ideas into oregamy animals!

Well, thank you for listening to me rant and rave about my school days, and see ya next time! Don't let life bite you in the ass...without biting it back!

S.D. Houston


P.S.

Before anyone gets all pissy, I was not calling anyone (besides myself) a loser. It was a loosely generalized term often used by the ones who outcast others because they dont "fit in" in their scheme of what's cool. And those people don't realize that, oftentimes, their outcasting only puts them into a higher social status later in life when their artistic abilities are honed to a razor's edge to make up for and/or express the feeling of social abandonment. The mind pushed to it's most negative limits emotionally is often the greatest tool an artist can have.