Benjamin W Yeater
To me, writing is a hobby, the greatest hobby I've ever had. In my youth, I wanted badly to write a book, just one, I would always say. I never believed I would write four, and be prepared for more to follow.
I was born in Iowa but spent the majority of my life in Central Illinois. I even went to college at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. It was there that I took a class during one of my flights of major changing (three times in fact) in Creative Writing under the direction of Gabriel Gudding. I still have his book of poetry on my bookshelf. It helped to open something untapped in the form of sudden fiction, extremely short stories no more than a page or two in length. I found writing to be relaxing, a way to channel a lot of the negative energy I carried with me and had carried for years.
After college, I forgot about writing for a good while, instead working a full-time job and living on my own for the first time. Drinking became an important part of my life, in time more important than just about anything else. Some years later, maybe five or so, I began working on my first book, entitled Severance. It was a nasty story fraught with incest and murder, and, truth be told, I was ashamed of it. At the same time, I began work on my first novel to be published, a short book called Dismay. Looking back, I think it's a terribly written story, self-centered to the max, angry, lonely. I self-published, friends and family paid me compliments I hadn't imagined, so I published again, this time an over-thought and excessively edited version of Severance that frightened even me in my typical drunken state. Then the bottom fell out.
I stopped drinking in 2010, just after Severance was published. For a long time, I believed my writing days were over. For me, writing and drinking went hand-in-hand. Eventually, the urge got me and I began work on a still-unreleased novel entitled Evan Sands (originally I had intended on calling it Shades of Gray, but then you know what happened). I might still return to that book one day, even though it's collecting figurative dust on my computer's hard drive. My third novel, Falling from Jupiter, is an epic love story spanning several years. Despite the length, I wrote it with haste in about four months. After several rounds of proofreading and editing, I self-published again, this time with pride in my work. I loved the story contained within those pages, and though I took a long, well-deserved break from writing, I knew something would possess me to write yet again, which it did, a year later.
Today, I feel that I can write anything I want. In the past, the only thing I believed I could do was love stories. My newest novel, The Archangel, while in part a love story, of sorts, is more a crack at the dystopian genre. I'd read a fair amount of Orwell and Phillip K. Dick over the preceding year, and their influence can be felt more often than it should. I foresee a horror story next, something to keep me up at night as if I don't already have enough trouble sleeping.
Writing is a hobby for this author. I do it for the love of the written word, for all those years I didn't believe I could, for every time I started a new book I couldn't wait to finish and ever time I ended one I wished I could start over again. Books are special things, they make us human, they teach us about the world around us, about love and hate, good and evil and everything in between. I believe in those gray areas, and I live within those grays day and night.
