About Me

My name is Matt Pedone, though I have been called many other things over the course of my 3+ decades, mostly because I was born in the late 70's, when apparently only four names existed - Matthew, Michael, James, and John - and partly because some people are just jerks. Sadly, none of my nicknames have come about because anonymity is important for someone in my profession. In pretty much every profession I've had (which, OK, is only 2 so far), anonymity hasn't been so much a necessity as a given.

Basically, I am a worker drone. I don't say that with any sort of deprecation - my current role as drone is actually far more enjoyable than previous iterations - just a simple statement of fact. For a few years a while back, I thought I would be a writer. Then I realized that it is very difficult to get someone to pay you to sit around and write all day (I once tricked a company into doing it, but it wasn't much fun, as I had to be constantly alert so as to not get caught). Instead, I took the easy way out, because I am, in fact, rather lazy, and let writing become a hobby, wedging it in when I could find the time, but never really making the time. I've submitted a couple of short stories, one to a journal, one to a competition, and was rejected both times. The journal, I didn't mind, but the competition rankled me. At first, it was because I felt worthless. Later, it was because I felt stupid.

What changed? I read some of the stories that they accepted, then thought to the drivel that I had submitted, and two questions popped into my head:

1. What the hell was I thinking?
2. Why didn't I write something better?

Not to pump my own tires, but I think I've shown some talent, but what I wrote and submitted to that competition was boring, trite, and simplistic, relying on a narrative gimmick to present a faux-creativity - second-person narration. I've used it before, in the one story that I managed to get published in any non-self-published form, and I thought that returning to it would set me apart. Unfortunately, I had ignored the fact that the actual story needed to say something original, or at least creative, neither of which it did.

This was two and a half years ago, and signaled a sabbatical from writing for me. I took part in a few NaNoWriMo events, "completing" novels in 2011 and Camp NaNo in July of 2013, but mostly avoiding the act of writing outside of that. Lately, I have realized that even before submitting the rejected contest story, I wasn't really writing much, either. I had stopped long before that. That was my big mistake. I should have been immersed in writing - exercises, short stories, editing my novels, rewriting my novels, developing characters, reading about writing, just plain READING and just plain WRITING.

Even more recently, I started blogging again, trying to keep track of my experiences in planning a wedding (co-authored with my super-awesome bride-to-be), as well as home-aging bourbon, and, occasionally just rambling about some topic or other. So, I figured, why not a blog for my writing? I'd had an idea a few years ago to release a novel serially via a blog, pretending to be the main character of the novel. I think the idea would have worked for a while, as the novel started out as the chronicles of a sad-sack office drone trying to make his way in life. As the novel progressed, however, the tone shifted to something far more science-fiction-y and fantastical, so I think that would have tipped off readers. And then, there's the idea that if anyone actually followed the blog, and believed this character to be a real person, how would they react when they started to realize that it was all fake?

In any case, that never materialized, though I did finish the first draft of that novel, and so I thought I might try serializing it on a blog devoted to my own writing. It needs work, so that won't be happening right away, but I have other works that I might post, some things that have been posted elsewhere, and some things that few others have read. I also plan on reviewing books that I've read/will read. Essentially, I'm not sure what, exactly, I will post here, just that it will be devoted to writing, and maybe this will get me back into writing the way I was after college.