My creative writing journals have a gap between 1998 and June of 2000. For the life of me, I don’t know why I didn’t have a notebook full of various ramblings and ideas for fiction, especially since I know I was writing quite a bit. 1998-1999 was my senior year of college, so I was still writing my column in the student newspaper. I was also working on the first draft of a novel that had started in the original creative writing journal; I took the characters from that “Scenes from a High School Prom” story and wrote about 200 pages about the summer after their senior year where they need to repair broken relationships with each other (again, I really wanted to be John Hughes or Cameron Crowe). It’s not terrible, but as I’ve gotten back into writing fiction, I’ve thought of taking out the original manuscript (which I’m sure I have on a hard drive somewhere) and revising it. There’s stuff in there that I think is really good and other stuff that I would completely change.

Anyway, that was nowhere in these notebooks, but enough ideas and drafts for others.

I remember being very lost when I moved out of my parents’ house and down to Arlington in 1999. I had a job that I found incredibly boring and did not adjust well to living on my own in an area where I knew exactly one person. It was a bit reminiscient of my first year at college, so I suppose I have needed to learn to be patient with myself and drastic changes in my life. That’s a conversation for my therapist, I guess, but I know that I was really confused as to how I was going to be “a writer.” What would I “write”? Who would I “write for”? This was the early days of the Internet and the primordial ooze of blogging, but I had no direction in which to go and got kind of bitter and depressed over that. You wouldn’t see it in my writing, however, which wasn’t about that. In fact, it was all sorts of random and all over the place; so maybe there is something symbolic in that scatterbrained mess.

One of the novel outlines was a sequel to that book that I’d worked on in 1999. I took one of the characters, put her in college, and tried to do four years of college with her as a supporting character and another set of friends as main characters. While I wrote a complete first draft, attempts at a second one were ultimately scuttled because I couldn’t make it work the way I wanted it to. Maybe the timeframe was too big or the idea of a guy narrating his college experience was too Saved By the Bell: The College Years. I think I was also channeling my own college experience too much and trying fiction as a form of therapy.

Also abandoned was an enormous science fiction epic that I’d originally thought of when I was in high school. It started out as The X-Files, became something like Star Wars or V and ended with some Arthurian Legend/Holy Grail stuff. I had remembered the idea but had forgotten how deep into planning it I went. It’s not something I’ll pick up again, but it was fun to read. I also had some road novel called And Walked Off To Look that was going to be a group of people visiting every Springfield in the country and a commentary of America in the early 2000s. Even now, it sounds pretentious as hell.

And then there was my first NaNoWriMo novel, which I hand wrote (mostly) in these notebooks, often during a long Metro commute, and eventually typed up. Called For the Rest of Your Life, was the third in the “series” of novels that I’d previously drafted, using the same character from that high school short story as one of the four main narrators. It’s more or less dating and getting engaged in your twenties. This time, I was writing about where I was living, although none of the characters were based on my friends. I did pull in characters from the other novels and stories I wrote and eventually went so far as to complete two drafts and query for it but got rejected everywhere I turned. I guess that when you’re in your twenties, you’re supposed to be writing the Great American Novel and not ensemble comedies? At any rate, I thought about revising it again a few years ago and realized it would need a complete overhaul because some of the characters don’t work and there’s a number of very cringe-worthy elements (low-key early 2000s “guy” crap mostly). But I did successfully complete NaNoWriMo in 2001 and got the T-shirt!

The set of notebooks this time wasn’t entirely full of failure. If you listened to episode 101 of Pop Culture Affidavit, you got a history of how that blog and podcast came to be, and one of the “pre-history” aspects of it was a site I had for years called Inane Crap. It’s been down for about 15 years because once I stopped writing it, I decided that I didn’t want to pay for the domain and web hosting anymore. Anyway, so much of the first few years’ of posts for that site were in these notebooks and I remembered how random my approach was to it. I was finding some sort of voice, but more importantly, it was obvious that I missed having my column. Oh, and I had a livejournal back then. Yeah, lots of gunk spewed on the Internet between 2000-2005.

And then there are the few attempts at poetry.

It’s something I dabble with on occasion but never have any intention to actually publish. These days, I think it’s because I teach so much of it, that makes me want to write some. There’s a line that I apparently really loved and tried to put into at least a few things: “I already know the rest of your life / because I wrote it all out for you.” I can’t tell if that’s profound, cool, or creepy.

Anyway, there were several poems that had some sense of “completion” in the notebook and two that I think might be worth some commentary.

On the Way

Nowhere in front of me
Nowhere behind me
You in the passenger’s seat
an extra hour to cover
and what seemed like a thousand miles
from where we started
not getting smaller enough.

Tell you didn’t feel America
when we sat in that diner
after leaving Virginia
to dance with her cousin.
If I smoked, I would have lit up,
and maybe you would have too–
I knew that look on your face.

You wondered if you were running away
because with all of our credits
we took another path
and that made us cowards.
But these days,
cowards go straight through,
not in the opposite direction.

Twenty miles between
nowhere and nowhere
we come over each hill with hope
but are meant to be in the middle.

I’m not sure what the inspiration behind this was. It may have been a poetry writing challenge from the MSCL listee group; it may have sprung up in a moment of wanderlust. It definitely is an attempt at “sounding cool” because that definitely wasn’t my style at the time. It really isn’t now; I tend to be a bit more contemplative and write about … well, mundane shit. Still, at least this isn’t as shitty and cringe-worthy as my high school love poetry.

Speaking of which …

Bad Poetry I Wrote as a Teenager

I was supposed to remember something.
Something long lost
among all that acrostic syrup
and free verse bile
that I still have
for reasons I can’t remember.

Appropriate words shoudl come to mind.
Instead, I turn my attention
to what’s here
as opposed to what was there,
what you were,
or who you are.

All those questions we were supposed to have answered
were accidentally forgotten
as fleetingly as I accidentally remembered.

So in 2003, when I wrote the final draft of this poem, I was once again thinking about all the terrible writing from my past. Over the years, I have attempted to write about it and I think that’s why I finally settled on writing in these blog entries as I throw away all of these old journals. The person in this was obviously my old girlfriend, who by that time was never on my mind; perhaps I had come across something about her or those old poems and decided to reflect on it? I’m not sure. And this may not be the best poem in the world, but I’m a little proud of it because I think it does capture the type of moment where you have a flash of memory of someone or something and there’s a peacefulness about it as opposed to anger, sadness, or regret.

By the time this set of writing journals ended, I’d gotten married and moved away from Arlington to Charlottesville, which is where I’ve been ever since. They were a lot easier to go through because as I did, I found more and more of what I actually put out there, and while I don’t think you can ever fully find your way, I think I see myself going in a direction.