TerenceDorman.com

I sat down at my living room table yesterday with a bowl of soup and a glass of milk as my healthy lunch. As I do most days, I flipped on the television to find some sort of sitcom to watch during the half hour it takes me to enjoy my meal. The television clicked on and, as it always does, started on NBC.

I happened to catch a few minutes of some news program that must run during the lunch hours. The particular segment I caught was some attractive woman doing a quick rundown of some headlines, appropriating about thirty seconds to informing her viewers of the news and then giving her own opinion on the subject. The first headline I happened to catch in its entirety was regarding Facebook.

As I’m sure most of you know, a little while back Facebook implemented this new Timeline interface for profiles. Nobody had to switch to it and people generally didn’t like it, but it was a new option. According to this NBC news program, a few weeks from now all Facebook users will be forced to switch to this new Timeline interface, whether they like it or not.

I don’t really care at all about Facebook’s Timeline or what it does with its users. I use Facebook and I certainly don’t like every change they have made. The fact of the matter, though, is that I have nothing to do with those decisions and there is nothing I can do it about it short of deleting my account. I’m definitely not a fan of Timeline but I’m sure I’ll get use to it.

My issue is that Facebook changing its user interface classifies as news. I understand that almost the entire world uses Facebook and that the information is relevant to pretty much everyone. But is it really news? Does it really deserve a minute or two on a news program? I’m extremely curious to know what this Facebook news edged out as far as importance or relevance goes.

I’m not going to get into a giant rant about the media and news programs as that is meant for another day when I’m focused on that particular topic. Instead, I’m using this story to segue into a piece I wrote during my senior year at St. John’s University.

The piece was written for a Fiction Creative Writing class and our instruction was to write a monologue in the voice of another person, real or fictitious. I chose to write in the voice of Spider Jerusalem, the main character of Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, one of my absolute favorite comic series. The piece kind of exemplifies and shares some of the thoughts I have about the media and the government and how people see both entities, and this recent Facebook news bit reminded me of the piece.

I hope you all enjoy it. If you like it, or thought I did a terrible job imitating Spider Jerusalem, please let me know.
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Just wanted to take a moment to let you all know that I recently posted another article over at Diannara.com. The article is a full report of the Hallow’s End tournament at Grasshopper’s Comics this past weekend. I give a brief overview of what my deck is meant to do, followed by a breakdown of each of the five matches that I played.

If you’re interested in how my “Trust the Fungus” deck performed, be sure to read the article here.

After an evening of reflection and a few wonderful conversations with my good friend Max, I’ve come to quite a few conclusions. Not all of them are about writing or my own work, so I’ll save them for a later post and get down to the meat of it.

I’m finally, seriously, going to go ahead with publishing my novel. The first step in doing so, though, is finally admitting to myself that I’m not going to publish it as a novel. The work is a memoir, one covering about four years of my life, that I had always planned as releasing as a novel. I planned on changing some of the names and places just to make it a bit less obvious, but anyone who knows me would be able to figure it out rather quickly.

The way I see it now, there really is no point in doing that as I would just be lying to myself and my readers by trying to pass the work off as fiction. It’s a true story, all of it, and it’s a wonderful story. That’s the reason I wrote it. I thought it was a story worth chronicling and preserving in writing, and as a writer I had the means to do it. Who knows, maybe revealing that it is a true story will add some impact to it for my readers. I can only hope that will be the case.

So this is it. This is my formal, official announcement, that I will be pursuing the publication of my currently unpublished memoir, It’s a Love Story. I am likely to follow the same route that my good friend J. Elliot Riley did with his novel, Dangerous Clay, and publish the book for e-readers with a print on demand version, but of course that is all speculation at this point.

At some point in the future I’ll post a few glimpses of the memoir for you all to read as previews. Hopefully they’ll generate some feedback and interest in the work.

Come to think of it, It’s a Love Story: A Memoir has a nice ring to it.

The following is a small prose piece I wrote a few years ago that I’ve found myself coming back to every couple of months or so. I’m not entirely sure why I’m so fascinated by this piece of mine, especially since there really isn’t much to it at all. I thought it would be a fun piece to post here to show you all and maybe get some feedback. Be warned, though, it is very short and very uneventful.
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Although I have written a novel that I have done absolutely nothing with (it sits on my computer staring at me anytime I open my “Writing” folder), I feel oddly compelled to share the start of my next work with you all. For reasons unknown to me, I feel as though I have to let It’s a Love Story (the aforementioned first novel) sit and ferment for a while before I release it to viewing eyes. Fear not, though, as this is not me embracing “total avoidance.” To be perfectly honest, I feel as though It’s a Love Story just isn’t finished yet, like there is more work to be done. As some of you already know, it’s an extremely personal story, which probably fuels my desire to leave it in the dark until I feel it has reached a specific point.

My second novel, however, is one that I want to share with people as much as possible. I wrote the first chapter (that I will share with you after the jump) about two years back and didn’t look at it again until a year ago. Looking for something to scrounge up for my Creative Non-Fiction class I picked the the first chapter (which is very loosely based in non-fiction) and presented it to my class. To my surprise and pleasure, it was a hit! The class was roaring with approval and I had never before received such an onslaught of compliments regarding my writing. It was truly a victorious day for me.

Before I make the jump to the chapter itself I must share the tale of how this story came to be. It is rather elegant in its simplicity and I love sharing the moment with others. About two years ago, while waiting for a game of poker to kick off between my friends and I, I was sitting in my backyard engaged in a conversation with three of my friends. We were sitting around the circular glass table that my family still owns when the conversation eventually broke into two separate ones. I was engaged with my friend directly in front of me, while my friends to my left and right were engaged in each other. For all intents and purposes our conversations were criss-crossing each other yet unable to intrude upon either.

Then it happened. The two conversations came together in a wonderful moment of linguistic beauty. In the conversation I was not apart of, my good friend Mike said what later became the opening sentence to this chapter. Immediately after his sentence concluded, I said what was to become the second sentence of the chapter. Together they formed a perfect combination of both seriousness and hilarity, and it was at that moment I became determined to use those sentences to form the opening line of this upcoming novel.

Enjoy.
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