Nyctophilia: What It Is And How It Came to Be

A shamelessly self-indulgent origin story...

One question I’ve never been asked even once by lots of people is “How did you decide to be a writer and start this blog?” And since I’ve been in the mood to write an essay, I thought, this week, I would waste all of your time and share with you how I, Austin Addams, came to be the writer I am. Listen carefully.

The first writing job I ever didn’t get was my high school newspaper.

I liked writing and I liked reading.  I’d penned a couple of little two-page short stories about werewolves and crimefighting and other things I was obsessed with in my youth, and the few unfortunate eyes I’d allowed to read them said I ought to go talk to Niles Deckard, the guy who taught the journalism class in my school.  We lived in a university town so classes like that got more attention and funding than most.  I went in after hours and caught him before he could efficiently evade my notice, and said I was thinking about taking his class for my junior year (this was before I dropped out of that school in favor of one more sane that didn’t require homework).  He looked me over like he was checking for cracks in the finish of a used piano and said, “if you want to be a writer you have to prove that you give a damn.”  Fortunately for us both I gave not a single solitary damn, and the next year I was out of that school anyway.  I think it turned out best; I’d have made a rotten journalist.  Journalism is about reporting real-world events, and even at that age I knew that no events in the real world would ever hold much interest for me.

The first paid writing job I ever didn’t get was later, after I’d graduated high school a year late and was spending every minute of time I had doing absolutely nothing.  I had a part-time job at a little convenience store two blocks from my mom’s house and hated it in that special lackadaisical way only a smoldering creative mind with next to no work ethic can hate a job.  My dad, fledgling businessman, and indeed one of the most prolific and tireless fledgling businessmen I’ve ever met, told me about a friend of his who was getting into some business about reviewing other businesses.  My dad was well-aware of my passion for going to the movies and for writing, and said that I should call this man and see about becoming a kind of movie theater critic--I’d go to the movies (with tickets and snacks on the company tab), sit through whatever movie I wanted, and then write about what I thought about the theater’s service, comfort, sound and picture quality, etc.  Anyone who knows anything about me knows I pretty much do this for free on my own time and dime, so getting paid to do it was a no-brainer.  So when I had to explain to my father why I never got in touch with that man, I had to dip into my usual excuses of it “not sounding right for me” and how I was “too busy and never got around to making the call,” when in reality I suffered (and still occasionally suffer) from crippling social anxiety and the thought of calling a stranger out of the blue about a job was tantamount to sticking my head into a wood chipper.

I went to college mostly on my mother’s insistence, and despite the fact that I was certain it would be a gigantic mistake, it turned out to be merely a massive waste of money.  Four years at a two-year school and no degree to show for it, because after two years I fell in with a group of people I am now very proud to call my closest and most beloved friends.  I’d never had real friends before.  Oh I’d socialized with people back in high school, but we were all social rejects who spent time together because nobody else would spend time with us, and honestly none of us really like each other.  I still feel bad about those days, and I hope those guys are doing as well as possible, wherever they may be.  But the friends I made in college were all funny, smart, and interesting, and most bizarrely they seemed to want to hang out with me.  I chalk this up to the hormone-fueled madness often experienced by people in their early twenties, but either way it was probably the single best thing that ever happened to me, and much as it incinerates me to say it, if I hadn’t listened to my mother it would never have happened.

Let me tell you about English majors and how they all suck.  Every group of like-subjected students in a college setting have their thematic quirks, but those quirks are more often than not charming and endearing when you get right down to it.  Not so for the English majors.  You think you know pretentious people?  You think you know people so full of themselves they’re moments away from exploding like overinflated basketballs?  Not if you’ve never sat in a room full of the stink of tobacco-scented cologne and the sound of nonstop dramatic sighs.  Picture a young man who wants desperately too look like an old man.  Picture a lady with a new and expensive leather/canvas bag in which she carries lots and lots of fancy notebooks that are all completely empty.  Picture a room where everyone is wearing the same white button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up just a little.  Picture empty whiskey bottles.  Picture endless pairs of uncomfortable leather shoes, all polished so minutely that they blind the pilots of overhead aircraft.  Picture a study hall where people are just trying to sit quietly and finish their essays or their math homework, but it’s impossible to concentrate because somebody is writing their paper on a fucking typewriter for some unguessable reason.  Picture a guy, “forced” to attend a party, skulking in a corner, pretending to read a book, completely ignoring the advances of any woman who approaches him because the only thing that gets him hard anymore is Ernest Hemmingway.  Message to all future writers--Ernest Hemmingway was a lousy person and a lousy writer.  Don’t believe the propaganda.  Guy was a jerk.

It was in this atmosphere that I became a writer, for better or worse.  Oh boy was I unpopular with my fellow English majors.  I had little to no interest in J.D. Salinger’s politics or whether or not Emily Dickinson was a lesbian.  I was too busy falling in love with the weird fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Aickman, J. Sheridan le Fanu, M.R. James, and of course Lovecraft.  Haunted houses, sea monsters, evil gods from beyond the fiery stars--how could Jane Austen and her fascination with formal dances compete?  I had no time for James Joyce’s self-indulgent prose or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tedious literary therapy.  I could muster no interest in John Steinbeck’s depressing drudgery or Leo Tolstoy’s boundless banality.  Even the Bronte sisters did nothing for me, except maybe Wuthering Heights because there’s a ghost in that one.

My literary journey took me to ancient, crumbling graveyards where hidden stairways led to nightmarish underworlds populated by monsters and demons.  It took me through magical forests filled with ancient wisdom, power elemental forces, and of course giant spiders.  It took me to the furthest reaches of space and the bleeding edge of time in a craft that looked like a phone booth on the outside.  To the reader and the lover of the weird and fantastic, nothing is denied, nothing is beyond reach, everything happens all the time and the impossibilities are endless.

So, when the money finally ran out and I had to leave school for good, the only road laid out before me was one paved with paper and ink.  Quite the depressing prospect.  Being a writer is absurdly easy; all one has to do is write stuff and put it somewhere where other people can read it.  There are lots and lots of ways to do this.  What’s right next to impossible is finding out how to make a living doing it.  See, the problem is that most people don’t like to read.  It’s hard.  You have to work at it a little.  It takes more than a little discipline and self-esteem to continue reading on your own, past the school days when the teachers make you.  So the number of people who are willing to read something just for fun is a slim slice of a population pie chart.  And those people tend to be the pickiest of bastards.  They only want to read the kinds of things they like to read, and rarely give new things a chance that isn’t recommended by somebody who’s already famous like Stephen King or Oprah.

This tends to clash mightily with a person’s creativity.  Oh, you could go the James Patterson route and reliably churn out trend-chasing thrillers with little to no real artistic value, and maybe you could make a decent living.  But is that why you became a writer?  To make a living?  If you wanted to make money there are lots of much easier ways.  No, you became a writer because you had something to say, you had stories you needed to tell, you wanted to engage in the holy practice of conjuring and composing the imagination.  You wanted to plant seeds in the garden of the collective consciousness of the human species, and see them grow into weird, exotic plants with poisonous flowers that glow in the dark.  You chose this life.

So I bought a typewriter.  No, shut up, listen to me god damn it.  I really, REALLY hate writing on a computer.  Word processors are some of the worst things ever invented.  I absolutely, firmly believe that no writer would come up with something so invasive and toxic as a word processor.  As John Hurt so wonderfully said in Love and Death on Long Island, “I’m a writer.  I write.  I don’t ‘process words.’”  Writing on a word processor is kind of like making love in the middle of a crowded airport.  It’s a little difficult to focus on what you’re trying to do if every few minutes some dipshit walks by and makes an offhanded comment.

Every sentence you put down comes with instant criticism from a word processor.  “Did you mean to write this?”  No you twat, if I meant to write that I would have.  “It looks like you’re writing this, do you want help?”  That’s okay, I think I already know what I’m fucking writing since I’m the fucking person fucking writing it.  “This sentence has some poor grammar.”  Listen you, I very nearly completed an English degree; if that sentence has bad grammar it was either on purpose or I don’t care.  And heaven forbid you ever misspell even one word.  I can barely read my own words through all the squiggly red lines that infest every paragraph like parasitic worms.

Writing my first story on a typewriter was one of the most liberating, fulfilling experiences I’ve ever had.  Not a single letter I typed would ever be read by anyone except me.  I could totally relax and just put the words in my head onto paper, and it was only for me.  The thing about writing on a computer is that you have the power to more or less edit it as you write it, meaning that there is a lot more pressure for you to get it absolutely right the first time through.  You feel compelled to be much more careful and precise, and as a result your work feels clinical and lifeless, lacking any soul.  But on a typewriter?  What, you misspelled that word?  Who cares?  You know what it means.  Oh, you didn’t like that sentence?  No need to backspace and rewrite, just cross it out with a Sharpie and keep going.  Scribble notes as you go.  Smudge the wet letters.  Once, I wrote an entire page and ended up only really liking the first half, so I just cut the bottom off with a pair of scissors, glued it to a new piece of paper, and kept on writing.  It was glorious, messy, human, and so much fun I often found myself furiously typing away into the wee small hours of the morning, much to the dismay of my roommates.

What I ended up with was a horror story that has since been titled “The Tome of the Moonsong.”  I published it here on my blog last year.  The published version was much rewritten, cleaned up and streamlined, but the wrinkled, ink-stained, stapled and glued together original paper manuscript remains one of my most precious creations, and a living tribute to the things I believe about what I do.

And what are those things?  You know, on my more self-congratulatory days, I like to think I follow some grand calling to enrich the world and expand the minds of humankind with my stories, but that’s all just wishful thinking.  The hard truth is that when I was a kid, I felt like I didn’t have much of a place in the world.  I felt like people didn’t like me and didn’t want me around, and that I didn’t fit with the rest of the universe.  I was like a puzzle piece that accidentally gets tossed in the wrong box, and it will never fit exactly right with any of the empty spots.  But when I would sit down and read stories by my favorite childhood authors, like R.L. Stine and Louis Sachar, I often found stories about other weird and awkward kids like myself, and in between those pages at least I felt less alone.  So I write now because I know how much it can mean to people, how much it can help them, and I want to help people in that way too.  I am quite simply attempting to repay a debt.

Anyway, back to the typewriter.  I tried my hand at writing a few other short horror stories, and while some of them ended up pretty good (“The Chimney Creep” seems to be a lot of people’s favorite, which is hilarious to me considering it started as an attempt to imitate the style of R.L. Stine), others never really came together the way I envisioned (to this day I’m still struggling with how to finish “The Edges of the Iris”).  Horror has always been my favorite genre, both to write and to just consume in any form of media, but it can be a bit limiting.  I kept trying to write spooky stories on my typewriter, but was never really able to recapture that special electric element that made “Moonsong” work so well.  Then, after a miserable attempt to write a story about living killer chess pieces, which was one of the goofiest things I ever took a stab at, I kind of gave up on writing for a little while.  There were other turbulent things going on in my life at the time that also contributed to this pause in my literary output, none of which bear mentioning here, but the effect was the same, and for a time it felt like maybe my dalliance with becoming an author was a dandelion--blooming briefly only go to seed before you even have time to appreciate it’s beauty.

But as it turns out, dandelions are my favorite flower, partly because no matter how much toxic weed killer you dump on your lawn, the glorious little yellow bastards always come back.

Ugh, really?  Comparing myself to a flower?  Maybe I should take back some of the things I said about the pretentious English majors.

I never really lost my interest in writing.  Every once in a while I’d sit down and pen something for fun, like this here essay you’re reading now.  But the proverbial wind had gone out of my proverbial sails, until I finally got around to seeing Wes Anderson’s film The French Dispatch, or to give it its full title, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun.  For those of you who haven’t seen it, the film tells the story of the last issue of the titular fictional literary magazine, and is full of the director’s trademark irreverent humor and highly distinctive visual style.  It’s a loveletter to journalism and to journalists, and a celebration of what it really means to work with words as both your work and your passion.  It’s also achingly funny.  It was the first Wes Anderson film I’d ever seen (not counting the time I was forced to watch The Darjeeling Limited in college), and it reignited my passion for writing and for being a writer.  They say God speaks to us all in different, personal ways, and if he has anything to say to me, he usually does so through movies.  And this movie, about a group of brilliant, eccentric, emotionally complicated and socially awkward writers, spoke to me, and reminded me of how I felt when I was young, and read the books that made me fall in love with the written word.  It sounds corny and certainly is.

Which brings me to this blog.  What my earlier forays into writing lacked, I realized, was discipline, deadlines, a schedule to keep.  Fortunately I came across Matt Kirkland’s dangerously addictive blog Dracula Daily, and found at last the venue that would allow me to write in the way I wanted and needed--like a magazine.  I think, after my days in college, becoming obsessed with the work of early twentieth century weird fiction authors, almost all of whom published their works in serialized magazine form, my own writing had come to unconsciously imitate their pacing, a pacing designed to be read and consumed in chunks, piecemeal, until the whole reveals itself in its completed form.  It’s also a format that gels beautifully with the modern media world’s fast-paced and impatient appetites.  And so Nyctophilia was launched, though I prefer to use the term “catapulted,” in June of 2022, and continues more or less regularly to this day.

So what?  Does any of it have any value?  Does any of this story mean anything to anyone but me?  Certainly not.  Nothing creative has any real value.  You can’t eat it, or build shelter out of it, or use it to attract a mate (take my word for it).  So I guess all I have to say at the end is this: you absolutely, positively, should not ever read anything I or anyone else writes, especially if their writing is purely to entertain, enlighten, or expand the imagination.  Nothing could be a greater waste of your limited time.

Unless, of course, you are more than a monkey.  If you’re someone who wants something deeper and more meaningful out of life, something that will bring life and color and sparkle to to existence, something that will give it all value and make it into something worth having.  Will my writing do any of that for you?  Will anyone’s writing?  No idea.  But we like to think it might.  That’s really why we do it, you know.  It’s definitely why I do it.