Welcome to my virtual office. I’m not really not in Room 808 in the Hackard Building, and 808 Hackard is not a reference to smoking marijuana in Hawaii. It’s a fictional address, an homage to a famous writer and his greatest character. If you know whose fictional office address was 808 Hackard Building, New York, NY (without googling it) post a comment.
I write a lot of stuff that never sells and nobody reads. After 32 years I have to figure out if I’m a crappy writer, a lazy writer, or a just a very very unlucky writer. I have to know which of the the three it is, so I’ve decided to put some of my stuff up on the web to see if anybody likes it. Okay, so I dangle a participle from time to time. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been published. My wife says it’s because my stuff isn’t mainstream enough and is generally just too weird. Maybe there are four options instead of three. We’ll see.
I shouldn’t say I’ve never published, but almost never. A couple of poems in the Journal of Asian Martial arts back in the 90s. I reviewed a few games for a magazine back in the 80s (that was when RPG gamers read actual paper magazines). Before that some friends and I created and sold an RPG called Spaz Zone. If you want to go really far back, I used to write articles and draw editorial cartoons for my college paper. In high school I wrote and drew for the school newspaper and the annual. Not a very impressive literary resume, but it is what it is.
My first writing project was a science fiction novel I started when I was fifteen years old. It was about a starship captain orbiting a planet called Ganglia. I let a friend of mine read the first chapter. He pointed out that the word “ganglia” was already in use by the biological community. I was so embarrassed that I let the project go cold and eventually gave up on it entirely.
Since then there have been other projects, both fictional and nonfictional. Some I’ve finished. Others I haven’t. All of the fictional ones take place in parallel universe I refer to in my head as Redneck Ul. Redneck because most of the settings and characters are rednecky, and Ul because Ul is the protagonist from the first book I ever finished, which I’ve rewritten at least three times, titled The Ax in Amber. Five years before Jurassic Park was a jewel in Crichton’s crown, my novel featured the discovery of a prehistoric ax encased in amber. Scientists use the age of the amber and insects trapped inside it to date the man-made ax to a period in time when humans were incapable of making such things. History is turned on its ear. It’s a great story. When I saw Jurassic Park I flipped out. What are the chances? Unfortunately I haven’t been able to figure out how to rewrite mine so that its premise doesn’t read like a Crichton ripoff. As soon as I do I’ll let you know.
The non-fiction works I’ve written center around martial arts and alternative spiritual beliefs. I’m in the process of creating a new martial art called Cabal Fang. I bought the url www.cabalfang.com and a website will be going up soon. Once that site is up, the companion book will be available free both here and there.
That’s about 600 words, enough of an intro I reckon. Come back soon. The door to 808 is always open.
An important note: If you comment on this site be prepared to be fodder for my writing. That’s what writers do. I fight with it all the time — the thing where instead of experiencing events in the moment all you can do is think about how you’re going to record it all later.
Robert Mitchell Jr. 