2023 Writing Retrospective, Part 1 – Sacred Mushroom

My First Attempt at Creative Writing, All Because of The Instigator William Pauley III

I call my friend

William Pauley III

, creator of fantastic, weird, and psychedelic Doom Fiction, the “instigator” in my creative life. I met him on GoodReads as a fan sending him a simple “Hey, your writing is amazing! Just wanted to let you know!”

I read his work for the first time sometime in 2011 or 2012. I just discovered bizarro fiction and I never looked back. I was hooked. The Doom Magnetic Trilogy broke open my brain to what good writing is, and I was compelled to write to him a thank you note. I didn’t expect him to respond. He did, and I don’t think we have stopped talking since. It’s been a wild ride. He released much more in the years that followed, and I read everything. I’m still not sure how he has the magic in his brain to produce the stories that he tells, but it’s a trip. Turns out, my brain processes stories and ideas the same way.

I only wrote at any great length in academic writing during college. I stopped after school was done. Back-to-back graduate programs meant I wrote two thesis papers (about 40 pages each, I think?) for both my MBA and Higher Education Admin degrees. And you know what? I am putting those to work in my daytime career – I am a Financial Aid Officer (at a college) for life. It’s a career. I do complicated things, a lot of excel, and have an amazing job. I thought, this is it for me.

In the springtime of 2023, we were innocently chatting back and forth on GoodReads, like any other day. I commented that I have never attempted creative writing. He was considering posting writing prompts for his readers as challenges. That’s where the instigation moment began. I was officially challenged to write creatively. I warned him that I have never attempted anything creative like that before, and I have no idea or sense of how to do it. I accepted, with the contingency that if it sucks, he won’t post it on his page.

He posted the picture prompt, and the challenge began:

I took one look at it and my mind went wild. What exactly is happening here? Who is this thing and why is she here? Is she even human? What’s floating up above her head? Why is the ground bubbling up toxic poison? My goddess, the thoughts I had. My husband looked at it with me, we pondered what it could all mean, how I could build a story out of a single image. I took my time. I agonized over every word. Turns out, my brain was still very much stuck on a formal prose style, and it was hard to let that go. Loosen up, I told myself! This is not a term paper! I think I worked on it for almost a month, on and off. After I felt it was ready I emailed it off. I was nervous and convinced that what I wrote was not good enough. I had no idea how to build a plot and create characters. Turns out, for a first attempt, William gave me positive feeedback. I was shocked.

I tweaked it a bit more and then gave him permission to post it. I included real Gaelic language in it, and drew upon my fascination with ancient Celtic religion, goddesses, altered states of consciousness, and darkness. This story has so much of my DNA in it, it’s ridiculous. I found connections to one of my past lives later when I did hypnosis sessions, discovering that I was formerly a Celtic Priestess, a daughter of the Shaman. Read the story, below, from William’s original post:

Psychedelic Summer: Stories By Readers

Looking back, I would make adjustments and expand this much more in its description and rewrite all of the dialog. I have a problem with slipping into passive voice, even in my academic papers. It’s all over this piece. There’s a list of things I would tweak, and it would probably double the length of the story. But you know what? I’m not going to do that – this is the snapshot of where I started, the first attempt. I embrace the mistakes I made in prose. It’s a snapshot of where I started operating entirely on intuition. One day, I’ll write a revised and expanded version, but this story will always exist just like this – the seeds of creativity.

Here’s the story reposted on my page: