Because I'm Narcissistic...
About Me...
I was born at a very young age in the city of El Paso, on the western tip of Texas. Roughly a year afterwards, I had my first birthday, and have increased in age in a similar manner ever since. Presently, I am living, a condition I hope to endure for quite some time.
I've suffered through many vocations, ranging from expeditious culinary chef (read: burger flipper) to running my own web development company. I've managed to attempt college on several occasions, always finding some reason to pursue other activities instead.
I currently reside in southwestern Washington State, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, something that should be somewhat evident in the choice of setting for many of the stories you'll read here. In fact, the basis for Laurie Falls is roughly the town I live in, Chehalis, although there's inspiration for it in most any of the small (and smaller) towns in the area.
About the Stories...
The stories are a hobby I'm undertaking, with the intent that after a while I might be able to call myself a writer and change careers once again. When I'm not working on other projects, I try and get at least one new story out a week, even if it's garbage with hardly a plot line or any characters worth the paper they're printed on. Actual results may vary though; some weeks I've managed to write two new stories, other times I've gone for three or four weeks with nothing to show for it but a bunch of scribbles and a lot of frustration.
This is also a rather new hobby, as you can tell by at least the lack of quantity if not the lack of quality. I've only recently started taking a serious effort to write -- June of 2006 was when I sat down with a pen and paper saying "Dammit, I'm gonna write something, and I'll worry if it's any good later." Hopefully the stories will keep coming, but if they don't, then hopefully the few that I have finished will have some kind of influence on someone else. (Even if it's just to make the next Stephen King think "Hey, I know I can do better than this garbage...")
I mentioned Laurie Falls above; that's a fictional town that I'm working with. I'm sure somewhere in this world there really is a Laurie Falls, but the one in my stories is completely of my own creation. I do this not because I think I'm capable of fully defining even such a small geographic region as a town, but because I'm damned lazy and I hate to do research. Creating my own town to base my stories in will save me countless trips to some other town, as well as worrying that someone will send me an email saying "Hey, there's no Wal-Mart on 5th and Pine, idiot."
Also, just to avoid any possible problems, all of the events, characters, and locations you read about here is entirely fictional. Any similarities to anything in reality is purely coincidental or used fictiously. One last disclaimer: I do not intentionally plagarize, and if by coincidence I've written something that is strikingly like something in existance, please use the feedback form to let me know (including a reference to the existing material) and I'll take the necessary measures to fix the problem. That's something I could probably do better to not mention, but I'm paranoid that I'll write what I consider to be my best story only to get sued for putting it online.
About the Site...
First, if you notice the URL, this domain was originally home to my web development company's web presence. After the successful flop of that endeavor, I've tried turning this area into a programming community site and a personal blog, neither of which received much attention. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to go through the troubles of changing the domain name, so this is what we're stuck with for now.
This site's layout and general design was stolen from any number of blogging sites that abound on the internet. I'll admit that; my design skills leave much to be desired. However, this was all hand crafted from scratch, using jEdit for coding and FireFox for testing. I didn't personally take the picture that's used as the banner image, I found it on some stock photography site many moons ago and tweaked it in Photoshop myself.
Other than the feedback form, there is no scripting involved whatsoever, meaning that you're likely to see a fair amount of discrepancies between the pages. I say that gives the site character; others would probably say it makes it look amatuerish.
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