Why You Should Be Jealous of Me: I was in Chicago's Grant Park for Election Night, November 4, 2008; and I was on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, for the January 20, 2009 Inauguration of our esteemed 44th President.I am 29 now, I live in Columbus, Ohio, and I am working on going back to Ohio State, where I went for my English degree, to get a Masters. Let's see...I also run a website called Forgotten Ohio (www.forgottenOH.com) which documents abandoned buildings, creepy cemeteries, weird history, ghost towns, and haunted places of all sorts from all over my home state. It's a whole lot of fun to do, and it's given me the chance to explore, photograph, research, and write about many dozens of really fascinating places like abandoned mental hospitals, underground mining tunnels, forgotten subway systems (the Cincinnati Subway), old schools for the blind, deaf, developmentally challenged (I didn't want to say retards), veterans, and tuberculosis patients, and also entire deserted towns. Fun stuff. I've also been lucky enough to have two books published (Forgotten Columbus and Weird Ohio) and have a third in the works right now, and I've had numerous articles published. Surprisingly, I've had more written about me and my website than by me. So that's nice. Throughout the year, but particularly around Halloween, I very frequently have the opportunity to appear on radio and TV programs and be interviewed for local news stories about Ohio hauntings, so that's always fun. My long-standing goal is to have a novel published, and I think that's quite possible now that I have my foot in the door of the publishing industry. Once I do that I figure I'll be able to die, since I will have accomplished all my goals from childhood. Actually, I might try to keep writing books and make my money that way. I've never liked waking up in the morning (which is why I work at bars and clubs so much of the time, when I'm not writing--or doing some kind of political work, which I did during the 2004 election, as a regional director for a 527 organization called ACT).
I like to read an awful damn lot and always have, at least since I was nine and picked up Pet Sematary. I read fiction and nonfiction, and though I find that good nonfiction is easier to come by (if you're interested in a topic, it's easy to be absorbed by an analysis or exploration of it), but when I find a great novel there's nothing better in the world. In fact, when I say I like to read, what I should really say is that I'm something of an obsessive reader; I read while I'm brushing my teeth, while I'm walking, and at just about any spare moment I ever have. I've actually been known to finish two 400+ page books in one day. I used to read while I drove, which I know is not the most brilliant thing in the world to do, even if you read fast and think you're in control. I'm always happy to get a recommendation, if anyone has one. So books are pretty important to me, nerdy though that may be.
So are movies. Everybody loves movies, of course, but I think I'm a bigger fan than many. I find going to the movies and sitting in front of a screen in a darkened theater very therapeutic when I'm feeling stressed. I collect my favorite movies on DVD, and I also write screenplays and *make* movies with my friends and our camcorders. It's astonishingly fun, even if our movies come out looking like Plan 9 From Outer Space in color. But sometimes they look all right, especially the more recent ones, and we have plans to make what I hope will be an enjoyable and somewhat lengthy horror movie called Hillbilly Holocaust, starring two gorgeous actresses and a bunch of redneck cannibals. Good fun.
In thinking about what interests me, excites me, or intrigues me, I've come to the conclusion that I'm very much into the farthest extremes of things, if that makes any sense. I'm always excited to read a book if I hear it's the most intense, bizarre, graphic, violent, or disturbing thing someone's ever read. Likewise movies and art. I'm also interested in researching little-known historic events and learning the largely-forgotten details of each one. All the novels I've written have been modern, but I have a number of ideas that I'm looking forward to expanding, setting things in towns that haven't appeared on maps for a hundred years, or centering them around a riot or a lynching or some similar obscure event in the dim past. That's part of why cemeteries fascinate me--thinking about all the people buried there who lived lives full of passion and secrets and experiences, achievements and disappointments and love and everything--all of it long-gone, never to be retrieved. Does this make any sense?
My big e-mail address is [email protected], which forwards to [email protected]. I tend to work from that one. But, when my site is down (which happened twice recently, though it's a very, very rare occurrence), you can get in touch with me at [email protected]. Or message me here; the MySpace e-mail equivalent has proved itself to be a very convenient tool.
