Huh. I'm blogging over here. So that's a thing.

So...
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but I've been posting a lot of Facebook notes lately. Lengthy affairs with a lot of prose, and speculation, and opinion. Lately, and I think due on part to the drugs, which are making me more focused, I've been more driven to create, to generate more output, to distill my thoughts and experiences through a sieve of grammar and text and spawn something that is, with any luck, communicative, evocative, and entertaining.

Or... y'know... so I hope.

I hope it's no secret that I would love to be able to call myself a writer, to be able to create worlds, and people (fictional of course) and plots, and scenarios, and... well, stories.

But for a number of years now this been quite difficult for me. I hadn't been able to figure out why, I thought maybe I was just a touch slower than most, or perhaps not as original or creative as I'd thought, or maybe just plain unmotivated.

But as it turns out it was just Narcolepsy. My body has a difficult time with sleep cycles, and sends me careening headlong into dreamland in the blink of an eye. This is no joke either. I didn't understand it before, but when I nod off, even if it's just for the space of a few moments, even seconds, I launch into a vivid full color dream, complete with backstory, full cast of characters, and surround sound. Then when I wake up, a vague impression of the dream remains, but is largely forgotten, although sometimes some of the context remains, and I have to remind myself not to say things like, "so that might have been why she wanted to steal the baby." (I've often thought that if I could just remember some of these I could make a decent living as a fantasy surrealist short story writer.) Then of course I have to struggle for a few second to remember what I was talking about. This generally only happens when I'm on the phone though, at work, and as irritating as it is, I've learned to deal with it. Mostly by asking people to repeat themselves, or looking at my screen and reminding myself where we were.

On the plus side, the drugs are pretty good.

I don't get the same kick from Adderall that most high school and college students get, mostly because they've got a head start on me in the energy department. But it does seem to bring things back into focus, give me more energy, and makes me feel more motivated. So yeah, that's a good thing.

And of course that's how I can do this, and why I'm doing it now. I've been on the drugs for a few months now, and I keep coming up with things I want to talk about, and stories I want to tell, and opinions I'd like to express. Coming up with funny comments to Facebook posts and YouTube videos can really only take you so far, though that's still really fun. Heh... yeah, I'm kinda odd... nerdy... geeky. I can't help it, it's just so much fun.

But seriously, I'm hoping that I can find a way to carry that sense of humor, thoughtfulness, insightful commentary, etc etc over to this page as well. And I'll still share all this on my FB page, but also on my Google+ account, and maybe my Twitter, which hasn't seen any real use in a while. I've also thought about doing a Vlog just reading blog posts, just to bring it to an easier to digest medium. After all those Adderall kids have such a short attention span.

But what to Blog/Vlog about? Well, isn't that a great question, thanks me for asking it. Well I'm quite welcome. Well if you read one of my latest FB Notes, you know I'm an atheist, so I think I'd quite like to talk about that, and the hows and the whys, and my opinions about religion and faith and whatnot. Don't worry, it's not all subversive, I think as far as atheists go, I'm really quite charitable. Compared to Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens I'm really quite tolerant.

And of course fiction. I have a few ideas kicking around my head for some interesting stories, and I might use this place to flesh out some ideas. I have two interesting ones right now. One is about Santa Claus; what if he's not just one person, but rather a whole family which runs a multinational super-secret non-profit organization which gives charitable donations of toys, money and other important necessities, primarily to poor and homeless, but others as well, all over the world. And they fund it all by licensing the Santa Claus image all over the world to everyone from wrapping paper makers to Coca-Cola, a decision made back in the 1930s that saved the failing organization from the brink of bankruptcy. Now they run pretty much the whole Santa Claus industry from behind the scenes, organizing all the Santa colleges from New York to San Diego, and a few overseas, and setting up pretty much every public appearance from "A Christmas Story" to "Bad Santa" (though they would never allow standards to fall that far.) I have to think of some good characters, and a good plot for that, but I think it'll be pretty entertaining. In fact, I kinda like the idea of writing the story for free, and just accepting donations for Child's Play, the Penny Arcade charity that sends toys and games to children in hospitals all over the world. Rather fitting I feel. Check them out, and if you ever want to cry like a little baby check out their testimonials page. I swear the tears will just flow by themselves.

The other one has been kicking around in my head even longer. It's set in modern day America, in a world that has always known about and used magic, and where it's even taught in college. In this world anyone has the potential to become a Mage in the same way that everyone has the potential to become an engineer, or a computer programmer, or a chef, or carpenter, or anything else. Something anyone can dabble in, but that most never do. And like most of those things magic has the potential to be used for harm, in the same way that an engineer could start building guns, or a programmer can become a hacker, or a chef can stab you with a knife, or a carpenter use his tools to hide dead bodies. Mostly Mages are similar to engineers, or mathematicians, working to unlock the secrets of the universe, or to create a better toaster. But once in a while you get a Mozart, or a DaVinci, a Newton, or a Bobby Fischer, an Archimedes, or an Einstein. People who look at the world a little differently, and have a kind of instinctive grasp of the workings of the universe, in such a profound way that even they themselves don't quite understand how it works. This is what my main character is, a savant in the field of Metaphysics.

I've had some other ideas kicking around as well, and now maybe I'll have the motivation and focus to do something with them. I'll probably go back and post some of the things I've never really finished, or a couple that I have finished but haven't yet shown to anyone. Some of them are not too bad I hope, I think.

But anyway, if you've managed to read all the way to the end of this, thanks very much, well done. I swear most of my posts won't be this long or rambling. Or maybe they will, who knows? Now that I've found a bit of focus perhaps the discourse will simply spew forth like a great monologue fountain. I'll do my best to keep it interesting, and hopefully entertaining as well.

Let me know how I do with that.