•      I wrote every kind of story I could think of, although I was done with the confession stories, but mainly I wrote dark fantasies. Published some with the small press. I attended Clarion West in 1983. I wrote a novel that I thought was fun, but that I never typed up for submission. I wrote a second novel that was just terrible and that I could not re-read without wincing. Trudy and I married at 37, and she understood, from the very beginning, what an introverted writer I was. Aiming for any sort of professional fiction writing career kind of fell apart around this time. 
  

​     Instead, I self-published.

​     And I wrote exactly what I friggin' wanted.

     Something else happened around this time, too, the result of twenty years of being laser focused on learning to write fiction. I no longer had to think about how to write a story; I could just write it. The mechanics of fiction writing had infused into my imagination.

     Something ​else happened around this time. Before, what I wrote had very little to do with that universe I'd built up in my imagination over the decades starting before I began school. I'd assemble my stories using what I'd learned about the art and craft of writing fiction as my tools, and, although my imagination fed that process, I perceived my imaginative universe and that part of me that struggled to be a writer as being in two separate areas in my own head, as, say, working out a math problem and daydreaming are.  But, after I got married, for whatever reason, my fiction became about articulating my internal universe.                                                                                       I worked for a decade on what I consider my masterpiece, Cold-Blooded World.

     I published a monthly zine called Age of Super-Heroes for three years, featuring early versions of The Valids, The Fours, and Adam Forwarder.

     For the last decade and more, I've been at work on this Adam Forwarder project.

     If anyone had ever asked me how I categorized my own fiction, and no one ever did, I would have responded, "A cross between R. Crumb and Jack Kirby written rather than drawn." (Although that analogy's not entirely accurate, either. The name shouldn't be R. Crumb, but S. Clay Wilson.) 

CONTINUE