The Things No One Has Seen

I've got a friend. Okay, I have a few friends. A few brilliant friends. But this one friend wants to see things no one else has ever seen. And that got me thinking: I might be insane, but when I walk down the street, go to a concert or try to sleep, I see things no one else has ever seen.

My imagination is weird that way. I'm not unique; I think it comes with the self-imposed job description of Writer, seeing things that aren't there but not in a trippy I'm-losing-my-mind sort of way. Something simple, like the way the sun shines through a white cloud, can set something off in my head. I like the way the particular whiteness of the light makes everything seem extra-real, like walking through a dream. It's a weird experience that only lasts a few seconds, until the cloud has moved just that tiny bit.

I saw two birds flying through the sky, a seagull and a blackbird, and I see Yin and Yang. It makes me think about balance in the universe. A scale isn't balanced without both ends weighing the same, and those two birds set off that idea about the scale, about two opposing forces being necessary in the world. (And a note for writers: you don't get away with writing a story without an opposing force.)

I went to a concert in the O2. There was an impressive light show, lots of lasers and whatnot, and it made an idea in my head click. It was to do with the sequel to Bliss, the Sci-Fi novel I wrote last year. The concert was in no way Sci-Fi. It was just this connection, and in making that, I saw what the book would show the reader, a beauty I can't describe without the context of the story to unfold around it.

And I think, why would anyone need to go anywhere if they just change the way they look at the world. Seven or eight years ago, when I started to write the first book I ever completed, everything changed for me. I looked at different things in the world for inspiration, from old weapons to Biblical texts, at images of mythological creatures to the regular people who walk the streets of Dublin, trying to figure out the world I was writing. I wasn't very good at it, then, but I was young and only starting out.

The point is that I was opened up to the particular beauty of the world that can only be experienced when you stop worrying that people will think you're crazy. I doodle a lot in class, a lot of eyes and faces and monsters made of black spindly lines, and I jot down ideas and words in the back of my notebooks, and all that time the lecture could be talking about anything interesting or boring but I'm too caught up in the images in my head to pay too much attention.

That's what writing is all about: finding something in the world that matters more in that moment than anything else. No, there's more to it than that. It's about sharing that experience with other people. I don't mean like this, just telling you about that I do when I lose interest in a lecture for a few seconds to write down an idea - especially fun when the idea comes from two different lectures in a day and something about them just clicks.  Writing is about turning the experiences of writing down words and doodling into words that people can read to understand what you see in your mind.

That's why I write. Not just the things I plan on releasing into the world, but the stories I write that only one person in a dozen might get (a very particular dozen, too, though maybe that number is too big or too small.) I just want to share the sort of beauty I see in the world, even if it all comes across as being a bit weird. At the end of the day, I'm stuck in this city at least until I graduate college, and I get to see things no one has seen.

The world will be a crazy place when I finally get out to see it.

A New Adventure

Something happened to me a couple of years ago that made me stop and look at my life as boring. I mean, I love writing. I love college, however odd that might be. I even like teaching and working in the bookshop. But I foresee a lot of repetitiveness in this life. Weekends at the shop can get very boring, especially when there are very few customers around. If I didn't need the money, and if it wasn't a handy place to work to get books and keep learning about them, I would like to leave. (In saying that, I love having a job, and I love the people I work with... I just know that I couldn't do that my whole life.)

Even teaching, however different the challenges will be every day, might become boring. (Of course, that does mean I would be doing it wrong...) I just feel that my life might become too much of a career. Yes, that's a good thing for some people, but I don't want to feel trapped by my job.

Writing will let me get away from the mundaneness of reality, but in the end it's not quite the same as living a life. There's more to life than just existing, and that's the problem with working in the bookshop and teaching for a living: there's the risk that all I would end up doing is existing.

I want to live, and that means more to me than just staying alive. I want to travel. I want to see things I've never seen before, meet new people, try new things. I don't want to just hear about life from other people. That's not good enough for me. If I can help it, I won't be staying still for most of my life (you know, unless you discount sitting in a chair to write my books).

And of course, even that life of getting around and seeing the world and meeting new people isn't complete if that's all I do. Then I just become a traveller. I want to write new fiction, push the boundaries of what I'm capable of and deliver new stories to people. Yesterday, two ideas I had for books - one of them a standalone, the other initially a series of adventures - suddenly expanded and grew. The standalone book takes my current Dungeons and Dragons character idea (I'm that cool) and mixes it with an idea for a novel I got many years ago. It's possible the standalone book will become a series or a trilogy in its own right.

The series of adventures has become something much bigger. I can't even talk about it or I'll give stuff away, but it's going to be one of the most enjoyable things I'll ever write, and it has so much potential to keep on growing. I want to write it after the Sam Richards and The Daughters of the Muse trilogies, or at least get a start on it. I couldn't even tell you how many books it will contain, at the moment, because it's just an idea, but it's going to take up a huge amount of my time.

Both are fantasy ideas, I should point out. That's the beauty of the adventure that is writing: every time I write a new story, I'm brought somewhere fantastical. Even with the Sam Richards Trilogy, set in Dublin, I'll be experiencing the world in a new way: I have to create a life I will never lead and look at the city I've known my whole life through the eyes of a different man. It's possible I'll write spin-offs to that trilogy, too, but that's all in the future when I can think about things other than the main books.

This isn't just the wild dream of a young man from Ireland. This isn't just some take on The Simpsons ("I want to live Marge! Why won't you let me live?!") or some flight of fancy that will go away. I want to get published, and not just once. I want to show people stories and I want to escape the trap of life that is repetition. So I won't be rich, not travelling and writing for a living (that's the ambition, anyway), but I know I'll be happy.

And as for teaching... well, that's for when I want to settle down. After all, aren't all teachers as old as the pyramids, anyway?