Are you stalker or a voyeur? It's a matter of intent.
Are you angry? Do you search for the advantage? Do you watch, hungrily anticipating your moment to act? At night, asleep, do you watch yourself watching, hunting, looking for that moment to suddenly post, placing yourself atop the list?
Or are you excited, compelled by queer satisfaction, reading public thoughts and wondering what they think in private? Do you find yourself stroking F5, slowly at first, anticipating that next word, the next thought, of someone other than you?
You realize you are not completely dissatisfied by either label. Yet you feel deep inside that each alone is not the truth, is not the real name for what you are. You realize that all of your observations, your quiet listenings, your internal thinkings about what truly motivates the actions around you lead to one simple conclusion: you are a writer.
***
And so here I am, naked before you, a name to that shadow. It'd be really cool if I then had an awesome name, like Mordekai ( call me Kai). Instead, I'm just Mike.
I've been lurking about for a bit now, and have even taken a couple of classes. I've read a few workshop stories and the lbls; which has been suprisingly useful to me as a writer. I'm also going through and reading the essays; since I've been away from writing 20+ years I'm finding these to be excellent. I have read the forums, but have never posted. So here I am, naked and completely embarassed by my writing size. I'm really hoping it's what I do with my writing that matters more than the amount of my writing.
I'm aiming to write novels, most likely sci-fi in the Ursula K. LeGuin vein (softer sci-fi, driven by characters more than science). My current goal is to finish the first novel (using nanowrimo to get a lot of the first draft done) and then maybe work on several shorts while fixing and rewriting. If I can get something published inside of 10 years I will be very satisfied.
So thank you for posting what you do and writing what you write. I promise that I'll try to be slightly more obvious, so as to not creep you out too much about that rustling noise heard off to the side.
And thank you for reading; if you made it this far, I'm sorry.
<Mike />