Let’s see… what did I schedule myself to write about tonight?\u00a0 Another challenging topic on writing where I have to dig deep into my writer’s brain?<\/p>\n
Oh goodness.\u00a0 I’m talking about\u00a0Michael<\/a> tonight?\u00a0 I’m going to need Scotch for this one.<\/p>\n [pauses to get a 21 year old single-malt that tastes like a campfire and dreams conjured beneath a forest sky]<\/p>\n I’m going to refer to my friend as Michael throughout this post.\u00a0 Some of his fans know him as Todd.\u00a0 Some of his fan-friends may even know him as “Mmm. Todd.” He’s an independently published author that recently completed his first Masters of Fine Art at Sierra College, and you can find him most Wednesday evenings in a Starbucks sitting across from me, either writing or talking to me about writing, or both.<\/p>\n That’s a super quick, superficial bio.\u00a0 But if you’ve traveled this far with me, you’re not here for the surface level stuff.\u00a0 You want the deep dive.\u00a0 You might even\u00a0want a list of topics I’m going to cover as I write this 1500 to 2000 word essay on my best friend.\u00a0 Well, I aim to please, so let’s get right to it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Early Days<\/strong><\/p>\n In order to appreciate what kind of miracle it is that Michael and I are friends at all, I have to dial back the time machine to the early ’90s.\u00a0 I’m also going to have to talk about where I was in my life, some of the things that were going on that affected me, and how Michael fit in.<\/p>\n My first journey to Sacramento was the summer of ’91.\u00a0 I stayed with my Mom in her apartment in Citrus Heights near Birdcage, and I only planned to be there for that one summer.\u00a0 By the Fall, I knew I’d be moving back to S. Oregon and going to college in Ashland.\u00a0 My girlfriend at the time, Christine, lived in Medford.\u00a0 I hated being away from her, but I tried to make the most of my time away from what I considered my “real home.” While in Sacramento, I looked for some people to game with.<\/p>\n I went to the gaming store at Birdcage and put my name up on the bullet board.\u00a0 I think what I wrote was something along the lines of, “Experienced gamer, interested in most systems.\u00a0 No D&D.” That last part caught the attention of David Mullin.\u00a0 When he read that little note, he imagined that I must be a gamer of exquisite tastes and disposition, much like himself.\u00a0 Thus he invited me to join him in a game he was running in Rancho Cordova.\u00a0 I accepted his invitation and soon after, we became good friends.\u00a0 When the summer ended and I was getting ready to head back to Oregon, David said, “Don’t worry.\u00a0 You’ll be back.”<\/p>\n How prescient of him.<\/p>\n After a somewhat abysmal year of college, after the money ran out and the car-less commute between Medford and Ashland became too big a pain in the ass, I moved back in with my Mom.\u00a0 I hated it.\u00a0 My Mom and I didn’t get along that well.\u00a0 I hated being separated from Christine again, and if I wanted to get around the suburban sprawl, I had to walk.\u00a0 But I still had gaming with my friend David, which helped me get through the loneliness.<\/p>\n This is 1992 we’re talking about, before the internet was really a thing.\u00a0 David introduced me to a gaming discussion group called Techno-Gnomes.\u00a0 The group consisted of 20 to 30 regular members.\u00a0 I’m not sure how most of them found the group in the first place.\u00a0 Some might have found it through Usenet or BBS’s.\u00a0 Maybe it was simple word of mouth or through the gaming stores.\u00a0 My avenue into this illustrious group, which met at the Roundtable Pizza in Roseville once a month, was through David, who was kind enough to pick me up and drive me there those Saturday evenings.<\/p>\n And that’s where I first met Michael.\u00a0 That’s also where I met Richard and Jason, a couple of other wonderful folks that will feature in this story in just a moment.<\/p>\n At the end of Techno-Gnomes meetings, we’d break off and head to someone’s house and engage in a huge, usually terrible one-shot game.\u00a0 Michael ran a couple of these.\u00a0 And as much as I love Michael today and would hate to say bad things about him, his games back then were horrible.\u00a0 Not all of them, but the one-shots were particularly bad because he was a cruel, adversarial GM, and even back then, I wasn’t into that kind of conflict.<\/p>\n Adversarial is a good adjective to describe our early relationship.\u00a0 We were opposites.\u00a0 I was a bit high strung, wound up tight in jeans and a T-shirt most days.\u00a0 He was relaxed, a frequenter of Ren Faires and dressed in garb all the time.\u00a0 I was a conservative Christian boy, a virgin waiting to marry my long distance girlfriend.\u00a0 He… like I said, he was the opposite of me.\u00a0 He was a flamboyant charmer with confidence oozing from his pours, and he had no problem meeting women interested in the same things he was looking for.<\/p>\n I didn’t know at the time that we were both writers.\u00a0 He didn’t talk about any writing hobby with me back then.\u00a0 I remember showing him one of my short stories.\u00a0 I don’t remember if he was particularly impressed or not.\u00a0 I don’t think we exchanged much in the way of compliments to each other back then.<\/p>\n He was present the night Christine and I broke up.\u00a0 Jason had an apartment in the same complex as my Mom, and Michael, Richard, and I were at Jason’s house playing Car Wars.\u00a0 I had just gotten off the phone with Christine, not really able to move or grasp what happened.\u00a0 The game kept going in the other room.\u00a0 Jason’s cat sat on my chest, keeping me company until I had the strength to get up and rejoin the game.\u00a0 I don’t remember much else that night, other than I blew everyone’s mind when I rolled a 1 on a 6 sided die four times in a row.\u00a0 That was a pretty rough night.<\/p>\n I remember another night about a month later at that same apartment complex.\u00a0 My departure time for the Air Force was rapidly approaching.\u00a0 Michael Gallowglas, someone I’d gamed with several times but still felt guarded around, asked me to step out into the night so we could talk away from the others.<\/p>\n “Dude, I think you’re making a mistake,” he said.<\/p>\n After everything I’d gone through that Spring, Michael was the only one of my friends that took the time to take me aside and try to talk some sense into me.\u00a0 He tried to warn me off of going into the Air Force.\u00a0 He wasn’t trying to make me feel bad about it.\u00a0 He wasn’t trying change my mind for his own selfish reasons.\u00a0 He thought I’d be damaged or changed by this decision I was making, and he was looking out for me.<\/p>\n Even though I disagreed with him, it touched me that he was looking out for me.\u00a0 He didn’t know, couldn’t know, what I was capable of.\u00a0 The kind of friendship we had at that time didn’t give him any insight into the wells of untapped strength I possessed.\u00a0 But he still tried to look out for me, and I still remember it 25 years later.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Complexities<\/strong><\/p>\n I think that’s as nice a way as I can put it.\u00a0 It hasn’t always been easy to be Michael’s friend.<\/p>\n Let’s carve out some facts.\u00a0 Michael taught dance for a while until a car accident messed up his back.\u00a0 He made himself a name and a career telling stories at Ren Faires, a long chapter of his life that’s only recently come to a close.\u00a0 He has a son that’s a Marine, a son in High School, and a precocious daughter that’s about 5 or 6 that has him wrapped around her little finger.\u00a0 He’s bearing the weight of some trauma from early childhood, the details of which I’m not completely familiar.\u00a0 This trauma has led to PTSD, borderline personality issues, depression, suicidal thoughts, and difficulties with his marriage.\u00a0 All of his relationships, including his friendship with me, have experienced severe rough patches.\u00a0 Some of those rough patches have been so severe that reconciliation became impossible.\u00a0 He loves whiskey, especially Scotch, but because he’s working on getting his life together, getting his career off the ground, and most importantly, getting his mental health in order, he doesn’t drink nearly as much as he used to.<\/p>\n Those are facts.\u00a0 Now I’m going to give you some opinions based on those facts.<\/p>\n He has a deep appreciation and respect for the truth.\u00a0 I’m starting with this because some of what I’m about to say about him might seem unkind.\u00a0 But since I’m holding to the truth, and since I’m approaching these subjects with respect, I know that he’ll forgive me for some of my less flattering statements.<\/p>\n Harlan Ellison was his hero for the longest time, and Michael styled himself after the man in many ways.\u00a0 That means that like Harlan, Michael could sometimes be a complete asshole.\u00a0 He’d pummel someone with the truth, shaping his words like a blunt instrument and driving them home with strength and eloquence.\u00a0 He was an unrepentant, self-describing asshole with a chip on his shoulder and a need to prove something.<\/p>\n That’s who he was.\u00a0 He’s changed over the last decade or so.\u00a0 He’s grown a bit more wise, a bit more caring, and he makes an honest effort to be a better man.<\/p>\n He still prefers the truth, but he isn’t trying to hurt people with it as much as he used to.\u00a0 He’s taken on the role of a teacher and a mentor, and that’s changed him at a profound level.<\/p>\n I’m proud of him for who he’s become.\u00a0 He’s more generous than he used to be.\u00a0 He doesn’t look at things through the selfish lens of youth anymore.<\/p>\n I can honestly say he’s a good man.\u00a0 I’m not sure I could have said that 15, 20, or 25 years ago.\u00a0 I’m interested to see how he continues to grow.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Writer<\/strong><\/p>\n I read\u00a0First Chosen<\/em> during Worldcon in Reno.\u00a0 I bought it through the Kindle app on my phone and read it between panels.\u00a0 It had some interesting ideas, but honestly, I saw too much of Michael in all of the characters.\u00a0 I also didn’t like some of the choices he made with changing tense and perspective briefly at the start of one of the chapters.\u00a0 It felt artificial, like he was trying to do something clever that didn’t really serve the story.<\/p>\n I remember trying to talk to him about some of those choices he made, but he didn’t really give me much of an opening.\u00a0 He didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t press him on it.\u00a0 I also didn’t go and buy the other stories in the series.\u00a0 Not at that time.<\/p>\n Renovention was August, 2011.\u00a0 In the grand scheme of things, that’s not really that long ago.<\/p>\n And yet, for Michael, that could have been a lifetime ago.\u00a0 He’s grown as a writer.\u00a0 I listened to\u00a0Jaludin’s Road<\/em><\/a> in 2015, and found that story to be much more accessible than First Chosen.<\/p>\n I’ve read other work by him, and his growth as a writer is clear.\u00a0 He’s constantly looking for ways to improve and his craft is getting better and better.<\/p>\n This is the year 2018 and he can talk with eloquence, passion, and logic about the qualities and pitfalls of Pulitzer prize winning stories.\u00a0 He’s constantly reading craft books by people like James Wood and Donald Maass.\u00a0 He studies.\u00a0 He questions.\u00a0 He experiments.\u00a0 And he passes on what he’s learned.<\/p>\n I’ve had to learn a little bit about lit theory in order to hold up my end of some of our conversations on Wednesday nights.\u00a0 I think his true passion for writing really caught fire after he’d already put out a couple of books.\u00a0 I think his best work isn’t out there yet, and I can’t wait to see it when it arrives.<\/p>\n\n