My Condition

Writing in a nutshell.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about who and what I am.

What kind of person I am. What kind of writer I am.

Both questions are difficult to answer because neither has a simple answer.

A writing mentor once told me that if I wanted to build an audience, I had to specialize in one thing. Like an involuntary reflex, I automatically rejected her advice.

Impossible, I thought.

My writing is first and foremost about writing, so how could I possibly specialize in one thing? It’s about storytelling, style, perspective, and experimentation. It’s about exploring different voices, techniques, and cinematic experiences, and how they can be transformed into something meaningful through the written word.

I understand that most writers promise opinions or expertise, and that’s why people keep coming back. But that just isn’t what I have to offer.

My work is different.

I specialize in weaponized dark humor. I write cliffhangers about vengeance cycles with seamless escalations. My vector is endless self-created problems. My voice is lived-in: weary, practical, and contemptuous of the cycle I’ve been trapped in for decades.

I don’t think I could write persuasive arguments if I tried, because I am the argument.

If I’m an expert at anything, it’s making mistakes.

I like to joke and tell my friends that I have a PhD in nonconformity, and that I did my doctoral thesis on sucking at life. It isn’t an accredited degree, obviously. It’s me being a flippant asshole, although I’m secretly half serious when I say it.

Very few other writers would describe themselves the way I do. 

My goal has never been to specialize in one narrow genre. I’ve spent years trying to develop versatility—to mimic, to explore, to see what I can do when I move between memoir, fiction, horror, fantasy, satire, social commentary, and philosophical writing.

As much as I would love to be like Ken Follett or Miguel de Cervantes, I knew from the start that I never could be.

I had to navigate my own maze.

My only option, if I wanted to pursue writing, was to lean into everything that made me, me.

If a reader browses my Substack feed, they’ll notice a large number of prison-related stories.

That wasn’t by design.

It’s because that was the environment where I learned to write.

When I was incarcerated, writing became the tool I used to process everything, examine people, and understand myself. It was the environment where I practiced. It was the material I had available.

But the material is not me.

It has absolutely nothing to do with why I wrote any of it.

If you asked me what my agenda is, I’d say I don’t have one.

I’m not trying to change opinions. I’m trying to change myself.

I’m not trying to change the world. I’m trying to capture it.

And while I’m at it, I can glimpse myself looking back at me in the mirrors I create.

My purpose is complicated; more of a vision quest or a spiritual purge, while at the same time trapping the darkest depths of everything I’ve seen inside the most beautiful word-cage I can imagine.

Maybe that’s why I resist the idea of specializing.

I don’t know what I’m going to discover next, so why would I put limits on it?

I don’t know what I’ll become interested in, what experience will force its way into my writing, or who, or what strange things I’ll write about next.

I only know that I want the freedom to follow it wherever it goes.

My Substack is all this and more.

It’s essentially a collection of more than half a decade of research, practice, failures, experiments, and growth.

It is my studio.

A place where I explore different ideas, different voices, and different forms of storytelling without restricting myself to anything.

The writings here are my experiments.

The stories are the material.

The writing is the artist’s instrument.

And somewhere inside all of it, I’m trying to discover what my true talent is.

My real subject matter is my condition.