AJ Alanson Author

I’ve always been a writer. I’ve been a lot of other things but writing, like my height, prematurely gray hair, and strangely colored eyes, wasn’t a choice – and that’s because I dream. Every tidbit of life I experience throughout the day ends up in some chaotic toy chest in my brain where, as soon as I fall asleep, little imps throw ideas around the room in a ridiculous mashup of my life. So it is with everyone, only when I wake, I don’t forget. And that makes me a story teller.

This leads to a mind like a freakshow funhouse and in order to pass as an ordinary citizen, and have a few people willing to stay in my life, I’ve had to flatten my expressions and hide my thoughts as they race forward into fantastical plots from seemingly ordinary events. To this end, I also kill off characters of myself I no longer need or want. I learned this skill in my twenties when my first marriage of seven years ended due to my partner’s affair over four of those years – with my best friend.

On my way home from work, it all became too much. I laid down on the sidewalk, and died. I mean, my feet kept walking, but the old me slumped out of my skin and sagged to the concrete. After that, I walked by the body everyday on my way to work. Needless to say, I soon moved far across the country, but even when I’m back in that mountain town, if I happen to drive down the street, I still see her, the fresh body, as though she just fell. She will never decompose. Nor will she ever go away.

Since then, I’ve left dead me’s on roadsides, in the woods, a corn field, at a funeral service, and once on a cliff. I know now to be careful not to let the bodies fall inside my home. I had to move.

It became easier to shuck out of my old skin and start again. Start again. Start again. Again, by killing the past. It’s still preserved, floating in formaldehyde in a jar on a macabre shelf of the mind. I can examine it, roll it around in my hands and even take it out and play with it, but it’s not me. No regrets, guilt or shame…or anger.

I learned this skill to deal with anger, but when faced with impossible situations, I step out of myself, in real time, and smash up the room, or punch the person in front of me, and many more delicious acts, all the while, I’m able to smile at the irritation in front of me while I’m really just amused at my own mental antics. I can leave myself behind in the hospital consultation room, holding my head while sobbing in the corner, to walk out, pay the bill and drive home. I can step out of the car at 70 mph and take the motel receipts with me just so I can drive home, smile and wave and plot revenge. And this is healthy, as long as I don’t someday lose impulse control.

I’ve found this addition by subtraction works for boisterous laughter or fist pumps or any antisocial response to stimuli not becoming a lady. And more and more, the daytime actors in my mind don’t require abandonment but can reside on stage full time, because I write full time. I can live with them. Their scripts are endless.

Even with millions of words per year, all the strange stories of my sleeping brain are not lessening, but becoming more rampant. I’ll sit up in the night because the comedy shocks me out of the dream. I’ll wake in the morning with a smile already on my face from an amazing night of adventure. I’m entertained. If the scenes become unpleasant, I play them repeatedly until I work out a better ending. All of this is simply the genetics for a storyteller. I was confused when I was young. I’m not now.

The formula? By night, I make wild connections between disparate ideas and push ‘play’ to see where the story will go. By day, while my actors are on standby, grumbling or cheering, happy-dancing, throwing popcorn, or dope slapping me for slacking, I take in information from every sensation. Then, I set up the scenes in my manuscript, my thespians walk on stage, the lights come up and they show me a hundred ways the story could unfold. We all fall asleep with new material for the night, every night, of every day of my entire life. While I am legion, only by my fingers do we all exist. It’s an equitable arrangement.