Everyone has that one friend who
always seems to be moving to a new apartment, right? He’s the guy who, every
six months, without regard for his best friends’ vertebral integrity, packs up
all his shit and relocates. Well, among my circle of friends, that asshole is
me. Like the Beach Boys promiscuously said, I
get around. And, as a writer, that’s pretty cool. Because even though all
my pals now have debilitating hernias, I’ve lived in a diverse range of places,
and it’s done wonders for my writing career. From the building where the drunk
guy who slept regularly on the lawn to the dorm room next door to a gay
nymphomaniac, each place has left its unique mark on my literary endeavors.
Even though I was in school when
I started writing, the place I wrote my first manuscript was not my college dorm room. And it wasn’t just
because of the pillow-biting yowls of delight coming from the neighbor’s room. It
was because I loved the outdoors. So I scribbled my first script longhand on a
legal pad in an outdoor amphitheater. And it was there that I befriended
Marbles, the squirrel with elephantine testicles.
In exchange for stolen bananas
from the cafeteria, Marbles taught me that if I was ever going to succeed in
the stark, painful industry of publishing, I would need to proudly display my
testicular fortitude…without getting an Indecent Exposure citation, of course.
After college, I moved into a
Denver high-rise apartment I couldn’t afford, with a girlfriend I (eventually)
couldn’t stand. The place was sweet, but was so tiny that I had to step outside
just to change my mind. It didn’t have an office, but it did have a perfectly
good laundry closet.
Both my chair and my desk were of the folding variety. And
despite the gymnastics required to get into and out of my “office,” and the
fact that the underwear drawer was my armrest, I cranked out about forty short
stories and my first Fantasy novel in there.
The next place worth mentioning
was a few years ago, when I was in grad school. I lived in a house with a young
couple, whose shouts could be heard incessantly through the paper-thin bedroom
wall we shared. I never could tell whether they were fighting, fucking, or
murdering cocker spaniels. But living with terrible roommates taught me a
valuable lesson:
There, in my tiniest bedroom to
date, I consumed mass amounts of Tanqueray and beer, and learned the glorious
joy of writing puerile, juvenile humor. It was also the first time Bryan and I
wrote a complete novel together.
Shortly after that I moved to
Chicago, to fulfill my lifelong dream of having a girlfriend. And despite being
in the mold-ridden garden level, it was a cozy little place. Even the funky egg
smell went away after the nice man from the gas company came to fix all those
old leaky meters in my bedroom. But it was the neighborhood, not the apartment, which gave me so much inspiration.
Whether it was the hundred screaming children at the local urban water park
outside my window…
Or the occasional neighborhood
bonfire…
…There was an endless supply of story
ideas just waiting to be plucked, bagged up, and sold by the ounce, like those nice,
young hoodlum dropouts urban entrepreneurs so often did on the street corner.
Naturally, it was here that this blog was born, one hot-waterless day as I was
trying to warm myself up with a frosty beer in the shower. It’s also where I
wrote my parts of The Missing Link. By the way, TML just finished a 5-day free
promotional thingie on Amazon, and was downloaded over 15,000 times.
Cheers!
-Brandon
Music:
Manchester Orchestra
Beer:
Fat Tire
Addendum to post as of 2:38 MST...Our novel, The Missing Link, is now in the top 100 bestsellers of three separate PAID genres on Amazon.com! Cheers mo-fos!
