Waiter Detox Day -1(minus 1)

I've been thinking about Haley a great deal these last couple of days. Haley, just Haley. There are only two thing I remember about her: she was six foot four and she was named Haley because she was born in 1986 when Haley's Comet came around. Of course, in 1986, I was a teenager and living in the cold war suburbs of Denver. My friend David Reid and I spent our weekends awake all night star gazing, and I remember Haley's Comet very well. Perhaps that is a story for another time.

I met Haley when she came into Marlowe's, the restaurant where I worked at the time. She had never been a server before, and although it was not required to get the job, there just aren't many people who walk into a restaurant without experience and get a serving job. I was taken with her immediately. She was 22 years old at the time, and she had just graduated from college, Hawaii, I think, with a degree in Marine Biology. Marlowe's in Denver seemed like a very far distance from marine biology save for the fish we cooked and served nightly.

Why I Have Written

It may have started in 1984, at the age of 11. It probably started a few years later, fall of 1986. I was 14. I had written a short story. I was growing up and I was more and more withdrawn everyday. It may have been during that Thanksgiving break when I met Freesia. We talked about all the fantastic things we were going to do with life. Being a writer was her goal, and perhaps to impress her or because I was still riding a high with the first and only story I had ever written, I too said I wanted to be a writer. As far as Freesia goes, we're still writing letters, like we've been doing since 1986. We're both still claiming to be writers, or proposing to be writers or perhaps we're throwing towels because we were writers.

It may have started at any point on my timeline from the onset of my war in the Middle East in 1990 or the time I later started college in 1993. It may have started in March of 1995, after the house fire left me homeless and Bleeding Sheep published my first short story “Fish of a Nazi Haven.” Then again, it may have started a year later when I decided to leave Botany behind me and become a writer. Yes, it was January 1996, ten years after I first made the statement that I wanted to be a writer, when I decided to go out and do it.

Reflections on My Blog

I don't have anything more to say than I have said already. This post is the 519^th post of this blog's existence. It has been a weekly, or nearly a weekly endeavor, since April of 2010. Even though I had started my blogger account the October before, I had nothing of value to write about until April 2010. This was well over a year after I had left grad school. It was six months after we formed Umbrella Factory Magazine, and it was a month after our first issue launched. It was also after two other events that I think really shaped who I was going to become for most of the decade.

The first was that I was chosen to sit on the jury at the Kristin Stillman trial. Not a day has gone by in the last decade when I have not thought about her. The second is that I went to the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) convention.

At the convention I went to a session about how important it was for all writers to establish a personalized and professional presence. It was like this cross between the CV (a record of what you've done), what you're currently doing and what was to come. The discussion of a blog came up during this discussion. I sat in the back row and listened intently.

Why blog?

Honestly, who cares? I doubt this entry will have a bunch of comments following. It's questionable if anyone's really going to read it. So, why blog? Well, I was told that writing about writing is a good thing to do. And, I was told that a working writer should have a web presence. And, I was told that a working writer needs to build a platform. A platform is more than your CV, resume or current job title. A platform is everything you have done, are doing, and what you will do. And, I was told that a blog is a cheap, easy (two of every writer's favorite things) way to do all of the above. Well, I don't know about you, but I've now done this for ten years.

And ten years is a respectable amount of time to do anything.


Some Interesting Links:
My Photobook: Red Blue Grey
Interview: Meet the Filmmaker

Film: To Better Days

Interview: The Author of Coppertown

Film: Resort to Ice

Profile: Anthony ILacqua IMDb

Profile: Amazon Author Page

Review: New York Times Review

Film: Pastrami on Rye

My Online Publications

For the decade 2009-2019, I worked as editor of Umbrella Factory Magazine which was an online literary magazine. I was very active as a writer during this time as well. I chose to submit my work to online journals since that was the community in which I worked.

I had hoped that I would make a very tight knit community of writers and other editors at the onset of Umbrella Factory Magazine. And although I made a few connections, some very close, there was no real larger community for me. I had some very prolific years as a published writer, and that felt good. I also had some years that were filled with one rejection after another. Even the rejection is good when it came down to it because I was dishing up rejects left and right during my years as an editor.

Here is a list of many of my publications. As time goes on and these magazines and publishers go under, the link will break and any evidence of my existence with these magazines will be lost to the erasure of the ether.