Introduction

My name is Benjamin Crawford, and I have the best words.

The challenge, however, is getting enough of them, in a coherent order, in one place to actually create a story.  This is no small feat.  Words, the thoughts behind them, and for that matter the punctuation that bolts them together, are slippery little bastards.

By way of the background that you hadn’t asked for: I was once an English major.  Being an English major had the paradoxical effect of both showing me what words can do, in the literal and psychic hands of the world’s most gifted (and often, most tortured) authors, and leading me to wonder how I could ever remotely home to come within a few million miles of their standard.  The latter, of course, has proven a convenient, largely subliminal excuse — we each have our own voice, we are most of us not Flauberts and Joseph Conrads and, closer to home, Pat Conroys and Stephen Kings.  And some of us can be both happy and productive being over-hyped hacks *cough* Tom Wolfe *cough*.  Personally, I’d be content to create decently readable fiction that people enjoy enough to pay to download to their Amazon Kindle, who is not sponsoring this blog.

To that end, I offer you, gentle reader, this: an idea that took root during a writer’s retreat in 2012, led by the gifted Pat MacEnulty.  Her blog, The Art of Transformative Writing, is a platform for experiments, rough drafts-of-drafts, and musings of various shapes and sizes, from writers of various shapes, sizes, and length of metaphorical highway behind them.

The General Idea

• Each day I will write something.  It may be one paragraph.  It may be several paragraphs.  One or more of them may be moving, or clever, or in some way interesting.  One or more of them may be utter crap.  So it goes — because all of them will be first drafts, sketches, prototypes; choose your noun.
• This being a blog, posts appear by default in reverse-chronological order.
• This being a free blog, I have no elegant means of changing this, and so, the order in which you will see said posts is the exact opposite of the order in which I add them.
• My hope, aim, master plan, is to create parts that cohere into an actual narrative.
• What that narrative will become remains to be seen.  I’m new at this.  Thus far, my writing has consisted of a handful of ideas and partially-finished stories that span decades.  During my senior year of high school, my actual finished products consisted of a vigilante revenge fantasy involving highly improbable gunshots and dead drug dealers, and a collection of tastless and nauseating (or hilarious, depending on whom you ask) mini-poems.  So as you may imagine, from there to “long and complex perhaps-novel” is quite the trek.
• I welcome thoughts, critiques, dirty jokes, and praise of wildly varying degrees of sincerity.  Cash is better, but that will have to wait until the as-yet hypothetical day on which I put a finished product into some sort of marketplace.