“Mister LaFond, I do a bit of writing myself. Although you have yet to achieve status as an author of note, you have undoubtedly—as indicated by your insanely prodigious rate of self-publication—experienced much of what your betters have, who pushed themselves in a similar fashion. Might you indulge your readers with some tales of the craft? What were your craziest writing moments?”

Sincerely,

Gerald S.

Yes Gerald, there are six ‘moments’ that strike me as bordering on insanity which were intimately tied into the craft of writing—which for me is nothing more than staying one step ahead of the asylum rising in my mind every moment that I fail to eject the correlated contents of my mind in the form of the typed word.

#6: The most recent, and most minor, was waking up last Thursday night to the sound of my forehead smashing into the desktop. There were, understandably, a few typos in that piece, the identity of which escapes me, as it should.

#5: would have to be waking up to a loud crashing sound, which was the sound of my body smashing into the hardwood floor after I pitched out of the swivel chair while typing a RetroGenesis chapter White Boy Wayne! Help A Brutha Out! at midnight, while drunk, after walking home from the bar with Hemavore coauthor Dominick Mattero.

#4: was waking up from a nightmare in a cold sweat. The nightmare had consisted of me being water boarded by two cruel characters as chanting homophones [wave and waive, there and their] sat in a gallery heckling me, the homonyms and homographs fighting for seats at the back of the packed gallery, where Abraham Lincoln sat playing yahtzee with John Wilkes Booth and Eminem as Top Job from the Gold Finger James Bond movie provided security for the three...

I was strapped backwards over a giant computer monitor which pierced my organs with a painful light. All the while I was screaming for Doc Lumsden to rescue me, not because he’s an MMA fighter and E.R. surgeon, but because he can type 100 words per minute, and my cruel stick-figure captors had decreed that only by such a feet of dexterity—by me or on my behalf—could I earn my freedom. The torturers themselves were a large case O with a smile and a 0 with a frown.

#3: After staying up for a few days writing and working and training, and having passed out writing I woke to the following text buzzing on my cell phone, from a number that I did not know and which was blocked upon callback:

“Wake from your dream place…

“…to a beautiful storm outside your window.”

Then, thinking that I was late for work, I got half dressed and stumbled on down the rain-drenched and nighted road toward the bus stop, the pungent smell of the recent rain still thickening the air. Eventually the sound of Mister John’s frozen spinach hitting the tiled floor convinced me that I had fallen asleep on the job in the freezer aisle. I awakened with a start, weaving on my feet in unlaced boots, my shirt on backwards, standing in the middle of Glenoak Avenue at about midnight, watching a large fox turn and look at me accusingly, and then leap over a fence into the deeper darkness.

This episode inspired me to write, Wake From Your Dream Place, anthologized in the e-book Riding the Nightmare

and the print book Sacrifix:

#2: was a dream written into the following Dying In Your Dreams

#1: was upon the completion of Ghosts of the Sunset World, the second half of my first gigantic novel. At the end I had found myself in need of a character who was fated to die, and wrote myself in. I was writing in real time, on Christmas Eve, at 5 p.m. about the fictional death of Jordan [a fictional version of myself] later on a fictional Christmas Eve, stomped to death next to the car he was driving in as a passenger, a car which was driven by a woman. Almost as soon as I clicked save and turned off the computer my sister Terry pulled up out front to take me back to her place out in Whitebreadistan for Christmas weekend. More superstitious than I had supposed, I watched the clock for the ominous approach of the time that Jordan died, and watched the road for any big goons that Terry might be inclined to mouth off at, feeling very much like a doomed soul.

So far, Gerald, that’s it for crazy writing stories. Crazy interviews, that’s a book, 12 actually. Checkout the Harm City titles at our e-store and at Amazon.com.

If you are interested in more writing articles checkout Saving the World Sucks at this link.