Ever since I was five years old or so, I've always been avidly into writing. Back when I was a kid, inspired by the TV show "The Get-Along Gang", I used to create my own plays that my friends and I would perform in front of our parents while my dad filmed the entire thing on our Beta video camera.
Since then, I've written five full-length novels (three of them as part of the annual NaNoWriMo challenge), a novella, many poems, and several short stories. I find writing to be a mental defragmentation, and it leaves me feeling productive and satisfied.
This novel, a fantasy adventure story that weighed in at around 569 pages, took me about three years to complete. I started writing it at the age of 14, and put the finishing touches on it when I turned 17. Although I like the plot, I went through a phase where I felt it was somehow appropriate to pack as many adjectives in a sentence as possible, and because of that, it's a bit of a tedious read. I'd make it publically available, but I lost my only electronic copy of it and only have printed ones at my disposal.
My autobiography, written for the 2001 NaNoWriMo challenge. The ending is fictitious. Writing my autobiography was something I always wanted to do, because I thought that it would be a very powerful experience in terms of re-examining and confronting my past, only it was difficult to find the time and motivation to embark on such a project. I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out, but this was mostly a mental exercise for me, and never something that I'd make available for public consumption (LOL I'd likely get hunted down and killed by some of the people in my past ;p).
This is the novel that I wrote of which I'm most fond. After completing NaNoWriMo 2001, I was left feeling very empty from having gone from such a high level of productivity to being completely sedentary. To fend off that feeling, I decided to embark on another novel writing conquest, and my goal this time was to create a character which I felt was both tragic and beautiful, do him justice through written word, and accomplish this by examining the period of an approximate year in his life. Hence, Dylan came into being, and I'm really pleased with the result. I fully intend to try to publish this novel one day (when I get off my lazy ass and edit it ;p), so for that reason I won't release it.
Yes, the name is hideously melodramatic, but this is also another novel which I really like. I wrote this for the NaNoWriMo 2002 challenge and I have to say that again, it turned out really well. The premise is a fictitious examination of how sex can control us emotionally, both in positive and negative ways. The three main characters are three guys who are best friends, and it's set during their last summer between high school graduation and university. As they'll be heading in their separate directions once school starts, they're determined to milk as much enjoyment as possible out of their remaining time together. One of the characters reveals that he is gay, which causes another of the characters to question his sexuality and leads to a rather intense sexual relationship between them that ends up having consequences far greater than either one could have anticipated. Again, I intend on publishing this one, so I'm not going to make it publically available at this time.
I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this novel, which I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2003. The premise is that it's a love story between a young (and rather deceitful) boy and a significantly older guy, and how their love, despite the fact that they are both utterly content in it, devastates them both due to social disapproval. I find that the topic probably would have worked better as a novella, since I didn't have enough plot elements to drag it out to a full-length novel without it getting horrendously tedious. This is a novel I'll very likely release on this website once I edit it and hammer out the blatantly obvious mistakes. If you're interested in reading it, stay tuned :D.
I wrote this novella for the University of Ottawa Undergraduate English Student Association's 48 hour novella writing competition. The general idea is that it's a story of a man who is pedophilic in action (but has resisted his desires), but otherwise an exemplary person, who is confessing his innermost thoughts and past to a Catholic priest for assistance and redemption. It ended up winning the competition, which bagged me a $200 prize and publication in the UESA's literary journal. You can download it here: [PDF]
I usually write short stories about two things: drugs, or redemption. The tales about drugs, for me, try to capture the essential nature of the drug, or, for drugs I've only come to know through reading and not through experience, what I imagine the drug would be like. While I generally like those stories, I'm far more proud of my redemption stories. People don't often appreciate these with the same perspective that I do: most of the people I've talked to seem to think that they're highly depressing, whereas I feel that they're beautiful in the sense that you have some character who's faced with tragic, depressing situations that cannot simply be overcome, and has, in spite of this, managed to find acceptance, peace, and comfort.
I'm not going to bother putting descriptions of these stories, as they should be fairly evident from the titles, and they're incredibly short pieces. A lot of them need work and haven't been edited.
Forthcoming. Please visit http://www.noun.org/marc for poems if you're interested.