Eight years ago, my wife and I had an opportunity to move to Oregon so that she could pursue a job opportunity. There was a lot that went into the decision: both she and I felt stuck in our careers here; I had never lived outside of Detroit and I was eager for a chance to grow beyond the context of my friends, family, and hometown. It was a transformative experience for me, full of a lot of positives and one very impactful negative.
Well, more of a confluence of negatives.
In 2016, Clean Freak was out of print and I was running out of copies. It had been accepted at another publisher, but with no defined timeline, I felt stuck in time, waiting on the edge of my seat for edits to come back to me. I sold my last copy shortly before leaving in August, which left me struggling to justify going to a con that I’d committed to paneling at the following February.
I finished the last story that I’ve written ‘The End’ for in January of 2017. I’d written it for a call, which I hardly ever do, but I’d had the story for “Experiment: Schrodinger” for a while and it seemed perfect for the call, so I wrote it and sent it off, feeling pretty confident.
But it was rejected.
My story, “In God’s Own Image” failed to make the Stoker shortlist that year, even though the anthology it was in ended up winning Superior Achievement for an Anthology that year. It was still hard.
I wasn’t prepared for backsteps in my journey to becoming a professional writer. I forgot the lessons from my own life that tried to teach me that not everyone’s path is straight; nor does every life follow the same script.
So I went into a slump. I stopped writing for a while as the desire to write turned into a struggle to find the desire to write. I was so discontent, I didn’t recognize that my creativity was still coming out in the form of jokes.
Out in Oregon, unable to get a job in a theatre, I started working at a bike shop. One of the things that surprised me about working in retail as an adult–my last retail job was when I was 19–was what I call the aggressive “I’m just browsing.”
So I started offering to tell them a joke if they didn’t have any questions. This surprised a lot of people who maybe forgot for a moment that I was a human being. A few even took me up on it, so I told them a joke I’d written. They laughed at the simple corniness of it and we both left the interaction feeling pretty all right.
I went on a joke writing spree for the next 7 years. My only regret is that I didn’t write most of them down, so I only remember the really good ones.
Time and distance have provided me the benefit to see that even though I was struggling with a crisis of identity, I was still creating, I was still a creative person. I don’t know if I can be as dramatic or maudlin enough to claim that writing jokes saved me. But they certainly kept me going in a dark time in my life and proved that I can continue to be creative, even when I’m struggling.
The Chimerical Dark 