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"You must stay drunk on writing so reality
cannot destroy you."
{My 1947 Smith ~ Corona}
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
CHAPTER I: THE GRADE SCHOOL DAYS & THE '90S
CHAPTER II: THE NEW MILLENNIUM & THE DARK AGES
CHAPTER III: THE RENAISSANCE & THE SHARPENED PENCIL
~ links & pictures ~
About my writing journey, ...
The Grade School Days & The '90s Before I knew I wanted to be an author, I was interested in putting my words on paper. When I was young--probably before the age of ten--my grandparents on my Dad's side always needed to own the latest and greatest technology, believe it or not, so when they got a computer they gave me their typewriter (a white 1960s Olympia). I found a notepad that looked very much like paperback stock and put it into my typewriter one page at a time to write a novel. I don't remember getting more than a few pages written before my attention was drawn elsewhere. Then, when my grandparents got a new-fangled computer--Windows Whatever, I suppose--we got their old Commodore 64. I was quite pleased with that as I remembered writing a very short story on that thing when it was collecting dust at their condo and printing it out on dot-matrix paper. When I let my grandpa, "Gunk", read that story he informed me that he, too, had wanted to be a writer at a young age. The story was about a human culture living on Mars that was displaced by the arrival of a civilization-ending ELE asteroid. It ended by suggesting the Martians were our ancestors. Around that same time, I participated in the Writing Assembly at Westbank Elementary School, where I was asked to read my stories in front of a full auditorium. My stories have always won me excellent grades in school, and a teacher who liked my work suggested I participate. I brought my writing ability to different facets of elementary school, too, even showing a proficiency in poetry during the fifth grade. Poetry was not a format I continued beyond the classroom, but I always managed to make time for writing science fiction short stories. Since none of the schools I attended had any sort of creative writing programs, my stories were mostly extra-curricular. Grade 6, in my spare time, I pilfered some materials from art class to make my own comic book--The Scourge! It was a crime-fighting adventure about a scientist who somehow gained super-human strength after a laboratory accident! Never finished it. There was that short attention span again. Or, perhaps comic book writing was never meant to be my forté, either. My first attempt to submit a short story for publication in my spare time rose from the posting of a short story contest in the window of my ninth grade English class at Glenrosa Middle School. I was about 14, making this around 1998. My friend, Dustin Bosch, knew that I was an exceptional writer so suggested I enter the contest. I wrote my first short story for submission, but later found the contest had a western theme while my story, of course, was science fiction. The story "The Knowledge Keepers" was about an inter-dimensional alien race who stored lost knowledge of universes that had blinked out of existence. The thought of getting one of my stories professionally published was intoxicating. Seeing my name on a magazine cover, or alongside books of other authors became something I needed in my life. My dream of becoming an author had begun. School occasionally offered assignments to keep my writer's brain firing. Some I enjoyed, some not so much. I've never enjoyed writing diaries, or journal entries, as one is asked to do throughout school, but in my ninth grade English class my teacher introduced me to something much more interesting: creative writing as a substitute to journaling. Brilliant! I spent many-a-day dreaming up my own Star Trek-esque universe in my youth, so for my journal entries I created a television series, Beyond the Frontier, and penned the first three episodic treatments. Ten to twenty pages for a single journal entry earned me bonus marks every time, and my English teacher even told the whole class it was a good read. Much better than plodding recitations from reality! Grade 11 was another school year in which my English teacher was enamoured with my work. Any one of my short stories or essays got bonus marks just because I wrote them well. The teacher would even read my essays aloud to the class to demonstrate what he had wanted from the assignment. I would have liked a few more years with that teacher. If only I had gone to post-secondary, ... perhaps I would have been published long ago. Perhaps this site would be much fancier. After hearing about the open submission policy Star Trek TV shows employed in the late '90s, I tried my hand at writing a screenplay. I didn't have the proper software, so I found the formatting very tedious. My story about the Borg fighting the crew of Voyager was also not as good as I initially imagined. I, mistakenly, dropped the idea of submitting to Star Trek as life distracted me from the keys. I did eventually purchase scriptwriting software, which I use from time-to-time. Unfortunately, though, Star Trek is no longer open to unsolicited submissions. Sci-fi was having a Golden Era on television in the '90s, so I wanted to be one of the guys pumping out stories at such a great time to be pumping out stories. I read somewhere that writing short stories was a good way to break into the business, so that was where I began. Unfortunately, that was where I stayed since I wasn't able to get a short story published. Dozens upon dozens of stories I've written have seen dozens upon dozens of rejections. Breaking into the business was harder than I could've imagined. Not to mention I was submitting in the days of snail-mail, so it would take more than six months before I knew whether I could send it to the next magazine. One magazine even took more than a year to reject my story. Then there were the costs. Costs of postage, return postage to inform me of my rejection, paper, ink, etc. I couldn't understand what I was doing wrong, but I continued to do it. The New Millennium & The Dark Ages The start of the new Millennium was full of big changes not only for myself, but also for the writing world. The magazines where I submitted began losing subscribers thanks to e-zines that were instantaneous and much cheaper than their paper peers. Submitting by snail-mail became as quaint as printing a story on dot-matrix paper. To new arenas new writers flocked, infatuated by non-stop content and the ability to communicate in real time with their favourite people, or their favourite celebrities. Content, content, content, words, words, words--all for free, all at the mercy of deletion (or solar flares). I still wanted my name on something I could touch, something I could align with my other books on the shelf, something with that sweet paper smell. I wasn't immune to the siren's song of this new age, though. Some of it I quite enjoyed, like not having to use snail-mail, or creating my own outlet for my words. Or web-based contests. I was no longer limited to the windows of my English class. I found a listing online for a contest in California to create a television show in 2002. That was exactly what I wanted--a chance to make my own show! So, I sent a television proposal, Second Chance, to a contest called "The (4th) People's Pilot". I was very pleased when I placed semi-finalist, but disappointed that I went no further. I never got around to re-entering that contest, and, as of 2020, The People's Pilot is no more. My name had been listed on their website for years as a semi-finalist for their fourth year, but once they shuttered the contest, all names were removed. (*DELETION!*) There are, of course, more contests out there to create a television show,--but more on that later. The interest from friends and family about my progress as a writer grew after this accomplishment. In 2004, I created this fine site which you are now perusing. I learned how to create a website through George Pringle Secondary School, so decided I should put something together to keep everyone informed of my writing escapades in an attempt to keep myself from repeating ... myself. I find website creation and upkeep interesting. Whenever I visit a website that does something I like, I investigate the possibilities of applying it to this site and fall down a rabbit hole, recoding this and reorganizing that. In 2023, I finally figured out how to make this old site mobile-friendly. 'Progressive Clint', they call me. This website was originally called Clints_Writing, then Clints.Writing, until 2016 when it finally settled into Hallway Writing. I had often thought of one day naming a TV production company "Hallway Writing" as a play with my surname. As another one of my constant tweaks, the website had new life! There was, however, a Dark Ages to my writing when I didn't really update the site, and had all but given up on publication. But in the early 2000s there was nothing but possibilities. A big year for me was 2006, when I moved away from my hometown of Kelowna, BC, to chase dollar signs in the booming adjacent province. It was also the year I completed my first writing course through correspondence with The Long Ridge Writing Group, which has since renamed themselves "Institute For Writers". My teacher, Mary Rosenblum, enjoyed my writing and told me I have the talent to write. With her guidance, my writing was explained, re-taught, and re-imagined into a new, slightly more educated, version of my writing persona. I thought learning the trade through self-help books could get me published, but one-on-one training was much more enlightening. I always tended to write what I liked to read--fast-paced, action-packed, interesting concept. I've also realized that I'm a real big pulp fiction kind of guy, so that was what usually ended up on the page. My early reading experiences were very light on character, so when I emulated the styles of my pulp writer heroes my characters were quite secondary to everything else. Mary taught me to put more real emotion on the page and flesh out more realistic characters. In that same year, I started playing around with sharing my writing on social media, such as Writing.com. It's an online community where writers upload their stories to receive ratings from fellow writers who take the time to read it. When I'm lucky, I occasionally even get a personal review. While the reviews and interactions can occasionally help, I mostly just enjoyed getting my stories in front of new eyes. I guess you could think of it as self-publishing, but you could also think of this site as self-publishing. If I'm not getting paid, I'm not an author. The Dark Ages: the period between 2010-2015 when I wrote maybe 3 short stories. I'd like to say my Autobody career claimed all my focus, but I think I was just feeling a little crestfallen. Getting published felt like an impossibility. Long Ridge didn't seem to be paying off. Writing.com didn't help me get noticed or professionally published. Any update on Hallway Writing was one of anger and frustration. I needed to learn to write for fun again. The Renaissance & The Sharpened Pencil The Dark Ages brightened for 2016. A friend of mine, Mark Harrison, revealed to me that he wrote fiction as well, but just for fun. I, on the other hand, busily obsessed over every word, every phrase, every moment of my story to the point where it took me a year and a half to bring a short story to submittable during The Dark Ages. The fun was gone for me, I realized. It was just an assignment now--Get Published. When I first told Mark I wrote as a hobby, his first question about my stories was: "Are they funny?" I told him they were not. I think he asked that question knowing I have a sense of humour, so he assumed my stories would, too. So, why didn't my stories have a sense of humour? Time to have fun writing again. The first thing I decided to do: consider the definition of insanity. Short stories had not ushered me into publication, so it was time to play with different formats again. I blew the dust off my scriptwriting software and sat down to write my first screenplay in 2016, in full this time. In the form of an hour-long, episodic television pilot. Not only did I write 50-ish pages, I also hashed out a 9 episode first season. I submitted the screenplay to a television writing contest--the results differed from my first attempt. The reviewer seemed to like the concept, but accused me of writing racist caricatures. (Ironically, though, he called my Spanish character an Italian due only to his profession. ... Seemed a little racist to me.) I only gave my characters names from different ethnicities to try to give the sci-fi locale diversity--the names were completely interchangeable. The heartbreaking response reminded me that Ray Bradbury famously preferred writing for publication over cinema as his characters didn't have the volatility of Hollywood personalities. All that groundwork I did for my TV show, Ganesha, will one day make it into a novel. Rejection is just a fork in the road that leads down different paths. So that reviewer can go fork himself. That same year, I signed up for WattPad--a social reading website similar to Writing.com, but for a more eclectic reading audience. This time, fellow writers read my stories alongside a proper audience. I uploaded my latest story, "Wrought In Hell", for opinions while I was submitting it. One of the magazines must have had a WattPad subscription, though, as they rejected it immediately and said they only accept unpublished stories. So, I guess I should be careful where I post my original ideas since writers like to read. Maybe self-publishing had a little more weight than my own scale allowed it. My hernia surgery in January, 2018, forced me away from work for six weeks for recovery. I mostly read books (7) in that time, but I also got a lot of writing done. I wrote two short stories and a TV screenplay. One of the stories, a crime fiction I titled "Won't Die Old" about a killer of children, turned out so well I started thinking about how I could expand its sequel into my first novel. In preparation for the new The Twilight Zone, I wrote a half-hour dramatic sci-fi screenplay titled "Fallen Angel" about UFOs and Nazis! The new show debuted as a full hour program, so I tucked my script away, adding it to my frustration with the television format. That novel idea, though, started brewing within me. I had promised myself to try different formats, true, but my attention span and the daunting length of a novel conspired to keep me from long format. One thing I kept reading again and again in my How-To books was to write well you must read and write often. During my hernia recovery, I forced myself to write a little each day to accompany my reading schedule. It seemed to help keep my writing pencil sharp; the prose I wrote benefited from a writing regiment, just as I had read. If I had enough ideas for a novel, I thought, I could make writing a weekly habit instead of a whenever habit. When I wrote the first episode of Ganesha, it took me four Saturdays--an Act per week. I had a goal, I had the ideas in my head, and I had a reason to keep coming back to the keys week-after-week. By winter of 2018, I decided to sit down every Saturday to write 1,500 words of my first novel, Punch the Devil. I figured I needed a full pot of morning coffee to accomplish this feat, which made sleeping that night a little tricky. Since I still had to work on Monday morning, Saturday was the day! Another way to keep my writing pencil sharp was posting reader's reviews to GoodReads, who I joined back in 2012 simply to keep track of the books I've read so I didn't re-buy the same book, which I'm wont to do from time-to-time. I would use those reviews as a warm up before I sat down to write my 1,500 words. Social media is distracting but has its uses. Those "likes" do offer a bit of endorphins, don't they? Someone out there likes me! By Boxing Day, 2020, I had completed the writing phase of my first novel. I always used to re-read my stories before I started the next leg of the journey. It helped bring me back into that world, but I found myself tweaking as I went along, and, for my longer stories, this became quite time consuming. I couldn't imagine reading 110,000 words before I started writing an epilogue, so for novel length I would not revisit my past work. Stephen King provided me this idea in his wonderful book, On Writing. It made the process of editing, though, a further daunting task. Nevertheless, four months later I completed the edit, and had a first draft to send to my favourite reviewers. Writing a novel has become my favourite format to write, but I needed to maintain focus to complete the task. To keep myself invested, for the first time ever, I made my work R-Rated--no holds barred. It was a blast! The characters, the plot all felt interesting and real--probably making it my best work to date. That said, to keep this new Writing Renaissance moving I needed to keep the pencil sharp. I needed to continue those writing escapades on Saturdays. The only way I knew how to do that was writing a novel,--so I started another novel in the summer of 2021. This time I kept track of how many words I could accomplish in a year, just to ponder the possibility of becoming a full-time novelist. From my Saturdays alone, my output worked out to around 40,000 words per annum, which is technically one small novel, or one full-length novella. Not bad! Who knows what I might produce while typing five days per week? More importantly, though, the fun was back! My newest way to keep sharp is in my professional life. Rolling around on the ground, almost losing an eye, working through a hernia for a year only to recover from surgery and not get paid for six weeks is now a memory. I've still got the blue collar, but now I keep that bitch tucked. I have moved to the front office in a customer-facing capacity. A large portion of my job is sending emails--to customers, to insurance, inter-departmental. If I stretched the definition of author to just "getting paid to write" ... I'm technically getting paid to write. I am not declaring defeat when it comes to getting published, nor will I ever, but this new position is awfully close to my initial goal. It will keep me tapping keys when I'm not on my Saturday writing escapades. Only problem is: no one is going to collect my emails into hardback so I can put them on my bookshelf. Maybe they should, though. Those emails are pretty good. As for anything else about me, my opinions, beliefs, loves, and hates can all be found interlaced between my words on the page. However, populating a story with a cast of like-minded individuals would be devoid of conflict and not a lot of fun to read, so don't assume it's all a guide to life according to Clint. Now, here I sit, awaiting publication. You will be the first to know which lucky publisher printed my work. ...
"Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men." - Alexandre Dumas
"There are far, far better things ahead than anything we leave behind." - C.S. Lewis
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Richard Bach
"Follow your bliss." - Joseph Campbell
Favourite Movie Screenplays: "Forrest Gump" - Eric Roth; "Inception" - Chris Nolan; "Se7en" - Andrew K. Walker; "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" - Harve Bennett, Jack B. Sowards Favourite TV Shows: 24 - Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow; Babylon 5 - J. Michael Straczynski; Breaking Bad - Vince Gilligan; Oz - Tom Fontana; Star Trek: TOS - Gene Roddenberry Favourite Books: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain; The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas; The Icarus Factor - Timothy Zahn; The Mote In God's Eye - Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle Favourite Writing Books: The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack Bickham; On Writing - Stephen King; Zen In the Art of Writing - Ray Bradbury Favourite Reviewers: Dustin Bosch; Margaret Hall; Mike Myatovic Links of Interest: Main Site Home Address: hallwaywriting.myartsonline.com Mirror Address of Home Site: clints.writing.angelfire.com GoodReads Book Reviews: goodreads.com/clint_hall WattPad Profile: wattpad.com/user/hallwaywriting Writing.com: writing.com/authors/clints_writing Writer e-Mail: hallwaywriting@gmail.com
{The Uphill Battle}
{Clint Climbing a Mountain, 2010}
R.I.P. Colin Bradley Hall [1957-2016]
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