This is just the beginning and a small part
of what I plan to publish here. There are more stories,
novels, poetry, essays, short films, spoken word, music, and
art to come as I can fit it in with the renovation of the
Grand View.
Please do not high jack my work. If you
would like to reprint any of my work contact me through
this email link: Publishing
Rights
Finally some of the stories and poems are
harsh. It is not my desire to offend but to treat my art
honestly. If you are timid and prone to easy offense, enter
with caution.
1) About
my writing career, Or
thirty wonderful dishes with ramen.
2) Buttons:
One for the vegetarians, even though I myself am not.
3) Offshore:
An essay of working offshore in Louisiana.
4) The
Cock-A-Roach One of the first short stories
I wrote.
5) Mama's
Boy Trying to understand
another's grief.
6) The
Search for Eddie Lebeau This
is probably my best short story.
7) Pelicans
An essay from the bayou.
8) Euripides
It might be hard to imagine for some people, but
except for the name, I had completely forgotten about this
story. I almost didn't include it, because as I first reread
it, it actually made me uncomfortable. I wrote it after
seeing one of those stories about someone doing a random
murder/suicide and I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was
also right after I had found out the results of an MRI that
showed my neck had been injured, from an offshore accident,
too extensively to be a commercial diver anymore. A job that
I loved, the only job that I'd ever loved, one that was
going to give a regular gig to Japan, one of my childhood
homes that I missed passionately, and could no way afford to
visit on my own, let alone come back with several grand in
my pocket. It was tough to come to terms with all that and
it was a very unhappy time for me.
Lastly I almost didn't publish it,
because the story, as with a lot of my short stories, is in
the first person, which tends to make people think the story
is autobiographical, which it is not. I like writing that
way, because it's like becoming another person, similar to
what an actor does, but much deeper. There is a lot of me in
the story, because of my own struggle to redefine my life,
without having the support of a divers income, the free
travel to fun places, and being in constant physical pain,
but it is also me trying to understand something that is
insane, and something that goes on around us with increasing
frequency.
9) Shark
Bate, My second poetry
collection. The first one isn't digitized so it will follow
when I have a chance to sit down and scan it in. My third is
still imbedded in my journals and will take a bit longer to
come out.
My
Writing Career
For a good part of my adult life, I guess
a little over half of it, I spent every free moment writing
at the cost of my financial, social, and physical life. I
worked every back breaking entry level job under the sun and
under the water. I also, because of my prolific writing, and
reams of notes, I developed good computer and clerical
skills, which allowed me to temp, or take, every demeaning
entry level office job under the florescent. You've also
probably seen me in the background of several films. Some of
my better shots were in Twins and War of the Roses. I was
really happy with my two efforts with Danny Devito, you can
see me the longest in Twins. I am happy to report after
sitting and talking with Danny, during breaks in shooting,
that I found him as genuinely nice a guy, as he seems to be
in interviews. Certainly the nicest guy with Hollywood clout
I ever met. But I digress.
There were three co-staring roles in
action movies, and if you've seen any of them, you watch way
too many movies. In order: Killing American Style, Young
Rebels, and Gypsy.
In Killing American Style, I
played the younger bother of Robert Z'Dar and broke him off
a prison bus. Robert was the Maniac Cop and a lot of action
film watchers call him that guy with the JAW. It all
ends in tears. We both die in the end. The movie was a rip
off of Big Jake, and is the most coherent of the three.
In Young Rebels I played the
younger brother of a guy I recognized from commercials, but
I can't remember his name. My role: I was always getting
into trouble, looking for the easy way, and he had to always
bail me out, but he didn't do a very good job. I,
thankfully, died about 30 minutes into the movie. This movie
was, unfortunately not ripped off from anything, that I
could discern, and honestly after I died, it stopped making
any sense. I did meet one of the two cops from Plan 9
from Outer Space, but his acting hadn't improved. The
script was written by an Iranian, in his second language of
English, so the dialogue didn't exactly role off the tongue.
It took all day for him to get his lines out and I didn't do
anything that day but laugh at first, then cringe as
everyone started to get irritable. It did add a day of
shooting to my scheduled, which I didn't mind, since as a
co-star I was making all of twice as much, as I made as an
extra, excuse me background talent, in movies made by
studios. Even though the food was so much better on the
studio films that it probably made up the difference, plus
there was no overtime for the co-starring roles.
Gypsy, my final big role, actually
had a plot. The plot of the movie Billy Jack, I think
some of the dialogue was actually lifted directly from the
movie. I played, be prepared, wait for it, the younger
brother who got into trouble. If you've seen Billy Jack,
you know the role. Not particularly flattering, but I did
what I could with it. It wasn't long after that I ran out of
money and the screenplay option, I was living on, was
returned to me when the next option payment was due. Because
old full of himself (that would be me) certainly
wasn't going to let them keep trying to get financing if I
wasn't getting paid.
It wasn't that I wanted to be a suffering
artist. I would have been happy to have a patron, but I've
never been very good at sucking up, brown nosing, or back
scratching (Okay I'm a fair back scratchier', but only when
I feel intimacy). And all of these talents are required in
spades to get anywhere in Hollywood. I kept at the starving
artist thing, believing that the moment I began working
toward the goal of money, versus writing, it would be the
end of my writing.
Unfortunately during my years in Los
Angeles, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of
people were looking for the same type of work I was. Temp,
flexible hours, so I could go to meetings. When I went
through a particularly long stretch of unemployment,
combined with my roommate bailing on me, owing three months
back rent, I ended up on the street. The tenants, I've had
over the years of investing in real estate, can thank the
leniency I showed them on that. Since I was foot loose and
fancy free, I left town and went to commercial dive school
in Seattle. Thank goodness they'll give a school loan
anyone. Which led me to New Orleans and the oil fields of
the Gulf of Mexico.
I was right about my writing, it did
suffer. I struggled to keep it going but it was always a
constant battle. I started investing in real estate, with my
diving money, and when I broke my neck on a diving job,
moved into investing and renovating properties full time. I
did manage to fit in film school at the University of New
Orleans. Film School, as it turned out, pushed me even
further from my writing. While there, I agreed to write and
direct a film. After I had gotten all of my friends to work
on the film for free and put a year of my life into it, it
died the death of a producer who's words were bigger than
his wallet and there was no money to finish the film. So
began my quest to put together a production company to
finish the film. Then it was commercials and Rap videos for
me and no time to work on the film and less time to work on
my writing. Long story short, becoming
a business man, made me too busy to do long form writing,
and I have had to satisfy myself with my journal, and essay
writing, for myself.
This left me with a large body of work
sitting on the shelf, a lot of which has never even been
read by anyone but me. I used to know how many thousands of
pages I'd written between five novels, 10 screenplays, and
my collections of short stories and poems, but I couldn't
tell you anymore. While I'm good at picking properties that
prosper, writing business plans, and such, I have never had
the savvy, or the connections, to get one of my novels
published. The standard look I see in peoples eyes when I
tell them this, is that I must suck, to write so much and
not get published.
In truth, it's not the writing I feel I
suck at, I suck at getting published, which is much harder
than the writing itself. Also, while in Hollywood, I was as
full of myself, as is everybody else, and turned down some
serious chances to be produced, because I didn't think the
money was good enough. Please you could have turned
me upside down, in one of the stylish suits I spent all my
money on, and a nickel wouldn't have fallen out. Like most
idiots in Hollywood, I only dreamed of the big break that
would lift me out of poverty and put me in a Porsche. I
didn't dream of a crack in the door that would allow me to
work hard and polish my trade, while others made money off
of my talent.
So now that I'm older I have come full
circle and I feel about my writing the way I did when I
started: I love to tell stories and I love for others to
enjoy them. So I am dusting off the shelf, full of my
unpublished work, and publishing it all, for free, (isn't
that ironic) on this web site. I will let you be the judge.
Did I not get published because I suck, or because I suck at
getting published. I have started with some of my favorite
short stories [they have not been re-edited because of time
constraints, so please bare with any typos (ha did you see I
spelled bear bare?)]. Eventually, I will be
putting four of my Novels on the site. My second novel,
which is more like most peoples first, as it's a lame
attempt to be autobiographical, does suck. I don't need the
New York Times to tell me that and it will not be published
here. I only whish I could bring myself to burn all the
copies, but a good father loves his bad children as well as
his good. Then I will be rewriting all of the novels to
sharpen my pen, in preparation for starting a new novel Divers.
I will publish the re-writes and you can see how I've
matured, or changed-depending on your point of view-as a
writer. Divers does take it's background from my time
as a commercial diver, but it is not autobiographical. As
evident by my second novel, I suck at that, and will not
delude myself, or injure the sensibilities of others.
Thank you for your interest. I hope you
enjoy my stories. Please use the email links below to give
me your opinion.
Sincerely,
Baron Alexander
Keep
Writing Alexander Step
away Alexander
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