Words I Write Crazy: The Canker Death: Guest Post

Today, I'd like to welcome over James R. Bottino, author of The Canker Death, for a guest post!

Confessions of a Compulsive Writer

For as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a writer, and the fact of the matter is that I'm always writing. At almost any free moment, I am composing and creating some sort of story or scene or character or plot in my head. If I'm listening to music, which is pretty often, I compose scenes in my head that flow with the passion of the songs. While I'm listening, I don't know how these scenes will work into a larger story, but I know they must be a part, somehow. Sometimes I feel like I write stories to connect the scenes in my mind into something coherent. I honestly do not remember any time in my life when I was not this way. I find that some of the ideas I think about I end up dropping pretty quickly as being “too out there and not feasible,” but most others I latch onto for one reason or another. These ideas continue to grow and mature until I have a chance to write things down, once it's all been sorted in my mind. This is how it usually happens. Sometimes, though, I get some inspiration that makes me stop in the midst of whatever I'm doing to write down the idea. I'll be in the middle of a long bike ride and suddenly something occurs to me, and I have to pull off the path and frantically scribble my thoughts on a notepad. Or, sometimes, I'll awaken from a dream and know the answer to some plot point or theme or character or whatever. Sometimes the events of a dream spark the inspiration for an entirely new story. Then too, I'm immediately up and writing. As for how long I've been writing, I guess it's been since about the age of thirteen or so; that's probably the first time I ever wrote out some scene I'd been kicking around, though I composed without writing when I was much younger than that. I was fifteen when I first showed anyone what I'd written (a girl I liked), and it wasn't until I was eighteen that I ever submitted anything for publication. The work I submitted was a comedic short story titled “Beauty, eh?” which was extraordinarily silly, and was published in a local magazine. After my battle with cancer, though, is when I decided to take writing seriously and to dedicate myself to the long hard hours it takes to write anything, really, but most especially novels.

From Goodreads:
When the reclusive, cynical systems administrator, Petor Fidelistro, discovers that one of his own servers has been cracked late one night, he makes it his personal business to track down the perpetrator. What his search uncovers thrusts him, unaware, into a mad shifting between worlds, time and alien minds.

Fighting to keep his grip on reality, and forcing him to cope with his past, Petor finds himself uncontrollably transitioning between sentient minds that range from semi-conscious to dominant, from beings whose bodies and identities he can control, to those who control him so fully as to be unaware of his presence. As the story unfolds, Petor gathers clues in a twisting mystery that sends him shifting between the mourning child Nanzicwital; the golem giant Faskin; the lascivious, female ambassador Desidia; and Nokinis, an insane prisoner with whom Petor battles for mastery of his own memories. As he struggles to make sense of what is happening to him, Petor finds himself embroiled in the tumultuous upheaval of a ubiquitous society that transcends life, itself.

Author: James R. Bottino
Publisher: Septimus Press
Published: August 17th 2011

Bio:
James R. Bottino is a self-admitted computer geek and a creative writing teacher rolled into one. He earned a BS in English Education from Illinois State University and taught high school English in a suburb of Chicago for several years. After teaching all day, he studied creative writing in graduate school at Northern Illinois University. All the while, though, in the deep corners of the night, when no one was looking, he led a double life hacking and building computers and networks. Eventually, unbeknownst to him, word of his activities leaked out, and employment offers started coming in. In the end, he switched his hobby with his profession and became a senior computer / networking administrator for a scientific research laboratory. Just six months into this position, however, tragedy struck when, at the age of 31, James was diagnosed with cancer. Given ten to one odds of living out the year and knowing that his infant daughter would never remember him if he died, he began the fight of his life, enduring massive doses of chemotherapy that killed the cancer but nearly killed him as well. After years of struggle, he survived, but only after enduring systemic nerve damage from the treatments that left him permanently photophobic, phonophobic and with frequent difficulty in using his hands. These events focused his efforts and helped him to prevail in his dual goals: being a father to his daughter and completing his first novel, The Canker Death. James currently lives in a suburb of Chicago, with his wife, daughter, two Australian cattle dogs and far, far too many books and abstruse computers.

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