The genesis of a future and beauty of being a writer in Oregon

I am not big on resolutions. It seems rather odd to me to arbitrarily decide that some date on a calendar, a calendar which is arbitrary in itself, should somehow demarcate significant life changes. Maybe that is a factor of having lived a fairly healthy lifestyle most of my life, thereby not finding a major resolution necessary. But that is where I stand.

Nonetheless, with this arbitrary timeline for when we should take stock in our life, it is with renewed vigor which I approach another year of writing.

By trade, I am a sports writer. I make enough money to buy "extra" stuff for life and I am happy for that. Fiction writing had always been a dream, but one which I did not seem to have the requisite muse until the sports writing began to be a part of my daily lexicon. So here I am.

In October I completed the first draft of my third novel; it is long, complex, and deeply, uniquely, a part of my soul. Though nothing is directly a piece of my own reality, it is still a part of me.

During the last part of the book, when researching where I wanted a particular character to make his life altering choice, I took a day off of work and drove out to the small town of Vernonia. I sat in a corner at a small bar and watched. I read. I wrote. And I believe that what I wrote was really a different piece of the puzzle which became the story.

It is this kind of writing I would like to continue - a personal people watching style which allows me to feel the vibe of a real place as I fictionalize everything around.

One of the things I enjoy is taking my life in the Northwest and expressing what it was like to grow up here and live here for so many years. I have not captured all of it, and I probably never will. Yet there is that part of me which wants to share this with the world. The Northwest, and Oregon in particular, offer such a rewarding experience. Portlandia gets this state attention, but only as a "weird" place where hipsters live. I think it is so much more than the stereotypes perpetuated in mass media.

Every day there are normal people, going to normal jobs, living in normal homes. We are not weird, we are not all hipsters. We are a group of people who love our proximity to the goodness of what is nature.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove up the 101 with my wife. The following week, we spent two days at the Oregon coast. We marvel at the sheer beauty of the Oregon coast line. We marvel at the power of the waves, of storms rolling in over the ocean, of a changing weather which the following day allowed us to ride along with our sunroof open as we looked up into the blue skies.

I ran with my dog. Played in the water. This, to me, is what it is like to be an Oregonian. It is a great lifestyle. I hope 2016 allows me to write more about this wonderful place I have called home.