Round here he's known as... Strider
Who I am and what I'm up to
I figure this is as good a mo' as any to introduce the beloved Recurring Segment™ post, so here's my inaugural report on my doings and goings.
I lived most of my life either on the steel surface of New York City or in one of its larger moons. Interstitially I went to Oberlin College, sitting on the windy plains in a town of several streets. Tiny as it was, there was a lot of enjoyment and interest in those couple of square blocks, as if someone cut a cool neighborhood out of a city and, slipping, accidentally pasted it into the middle of eighty square miles of cornfield. At the moment I live in Washington, DC, which is a nice midpoint.
Work wise, I'm one of those kids who liked pretending much more than reality and never got over it. I empathize heavily with the 'working hard to be lazy' trope of someone who exerts enormous effort to do nothing, when doing their choice of somethings might have been less work. In my case, instead of taking up any number of relatively easy reality-based professions, I decided to train myself to be so good at pretending that, through intense study, focus and sweat, I can make my imagination real for myself and others in brief moments. In other words, magic. I'll write a post expounding on acting/writing being magic at a later point.
I also enjoy pretending to be a cool adventure man which I am not at all.
At the moment I'm writing a few different things; an urban fantasy action romp ten years past urban fantasy's hauptwasserpunkt(that's probably not actually how you say "high water mark" in German, I just wanted to say "high water mark" in one word); a YA novel exploring the question 'What would daily life in a super villain's mountain fortress actually be like?'; and I'm taking a go at a particular vein of gritty fantasy I'm calling 'sword crime.'
I'm also acting in a new play called People For Whom the World Spins and Turns with the Essential Theatre Company here in DC - more info to come - and trying to secure some other work for after that's done. Meanwhile I'm getting back into dog walking, which I did in New York for several years, to fill in the gaps and get me some more sunshine/devastating winds/meteors/etc.
Sometimes I think it says something sad about humanity that so many people wish they were writers/painters/actors instead of doing whatever they do, considering that what we do is pretend to be doing other, more interesting things. Which is not to say I'd rather be doing real stuff than pretending; given how much I've endured and worked to even start to establish myself as a professional pretender, I've very much firmed up that this really is what I want to be doing. I'm just saying, remember, the reason what we do is so important is that we tell the stories of those who do more than us. It's a crucial and beautiful job, but there are other, cooler ones, and some of them involve swimming with sharks and flying to Mars.
If you end up flying to Mars and any part of me helped inspire that, please let me know. That's all I really want out of all this, is to help other people believe in themselves and fly to Mars. Then once all that hard work's out of the way and there are commuter rockets to Martian cities all the time I can just hop on one and go there. So yeah, the arts are basically selfless.
