C.L. Stegall

You know, it’s funny. When one reads about how to “prop­erly” blog, the one thing that is reit­er­ated time and again is to talk not about your “prod­uct” but more about your­self or your area of interests.

Well, I can’t say that I don’t like to talk about myself. Hell, it’s one of the few sub­jects in which I am well-versed!

So, although I know I have a bio (or four) out there on the intrawebz, I thought today I would per­form a bit of self-analyzing. This should be fun!

First off, I would like to apol­o­gize for the extended lull in my posts. The Wife and I wound up with a nasty sum­mer cold that hit us with the force of a bullet-train. Three weeks for me and four for the Wife. It has had us won­der­ing at the true abil­ity of antibi­otics, since they were cer­tainly not serv­ing us with the expected results.

Per­son­ally, I hate and dread being sick.  I feel like I can’t get any­thing done and being unpro­duc­tive — in some shape man­ner or form — is like kryp­tonite to me. It only makes me irri­ta­ble and frustrated.

Dur­ing this past instance, I was par­tic­u­larly frus­trated, as I have been work­ing so hard on my baby: Dark Red Press. It’s an author co-op, an LLC that myself and my part­ners have been try­ing to get set up and running.

In case you’ve been hid­ing under some large and shel­ter­ing igneous out­crop­ping, the pub­lish­ing indus­try is chang­ing dra­mat­i­cally. (For only one exam­ple, check out Chris­tine Rose’s recent post.) In efforts to main­tain a greater cre­ative con­trol over our prod­ucts (our sto­ries and books and cov­ers, etc.), my part­ners and I have cre­ated Dark Red Press. Inde­pen­dent and entirely member-run and operated.

So, any­way, with my being sick I didn’t get a whole hel­luva lot done on DRP.

Nor did I get to post much dur­ing that time.

Please for­give me.

Now, on to the task at hand.

Like far too many folks, I had a pretty caus­tic and detri­men­tal child­hood. My one gift, the one that allowed me to sur­vive the envi­ron­ment in which I was raised, was my abil­ity to cut myself off from what was going on. I could see through the bull­shit and not let it affect me psy­cho­log­i­cally. I was lucky. Many are not. Nev­er­the­less, this envi­ron­ment, as one might expect, allowed me to dis­ap­pear into my own imag­i­na­tion quite a bit. Like, every frig­gin’ day.

What came of that was the absolutely won­der­ful abil­ity to cre­ate peo­ple and worlds of lit­tle more than words. It was all in my head to begin with. Then, in mid­dle school, I began to jot things down. Still, it wasn’t until my fresh­man year of high school that I wrote my first short story. Oh, there was no look­ing back after that.

It took a very long time before I shared any of my work with oth­ers. I’d say it was in 1991 that I first shared some­thing I wrote. It was a novella, about 25000 words, called The Moon From Heaven. It was, at its heart, a romance. Yet, one the sur­face, it was a vam­pire tale. The sur­pris­ing thing was that, when I showed to one per­son, they read it, loved it and passed it on to another. I sup­pose it wasn’t really until right then that I thought I might really be able to do what I dreamed: make a liv­ing of writing.

But, time takes its toll. Life gets in the way while you’re mak­ing other plans. All my plans took a back burner to the life I was leading…or, rather, that was lead­ing me.

Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence is some­times called and oxy­moron. In a few cases, that is exactly what it is. But, not in all cases, and cer­tainly not in the sce­nar­ios I found myself in over the six plus years I spent in the field. I can say this, how­ever: it only added to the library of expe­ri­ences I would use in the future, in my writing.

No mat­ter what any­one says, edu­ca­tion is both for­mal and infor­mal, and expe­ri­ence is far and above the best teacher one could pos­si­bly have. Book learn­ing is won­der­ful, but Mark Twain put it best — “I have never let my school­ing inter­fere with my edu­ca­tion.”

I’ve had some dif­fi­cult lessons learned over the years, most of which were not learned in any type of edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion. They were learned by trial and error, by expe­ri­enc­ing the wrong way instead of the cor­rect one, and feel­ing the after effects of screw­ing up so badly that I thought I would not come out of things alive.

If there is one thing I have learned about myself over the course of my life it is this. I am a sur­vivor. I will do what it takes to get out of things alive. I will learn what I have to in order to accom­plish those things I set out to accom­plish. I will do what I have to. Sim­ple as that.

What have you learned about your­self over the course of your life?