Words of Redemption

My Name is Brandon Satrom, and I have wanted to be a writer since I was seven. I’ll admit that seven is a pretty early age to want to do anything other than yell “Go Joe!” at plastic figurines, pull pigtails and torment ants, but I remember being fascinated with creating stories which others would want to read. I even remember writing a story of my own.¹ It was a science fiction story, with terrible pencil illustrations, about a young cavalier star pilot who saves humanity from extinction by spiriting them away to a new planet which looks eerily like earth, has no human life forms, but can easily sustain life. Sounds great, right? Interested publishers can email me at bsatrom at gmail dot com.

That story is long gone as far as I know. My mom might actually still have it in a box somewhere, but I certainly don’t. Not that I would tell you if I did have it, the rocket-ship illustrations are enough to send one running from the room, trust me.

And I have no remorse that the Space Hero story is lost, because what it said doesn’t matter. What does matter to me is that the Space Hero story was my green light; a starting point on my current journey. “This is where it all began,” it might say on a brushed metal plate placed under a display copy of that story in some small-town museum. And mothers would shield the eyes of their children from the horror that is those illustrations. (I’m not kidding, those graphite disasters are seared in my mind.)

Next came the journals. Thirteen of them to be exact. My first entry was in January of 1996 and my latest was today. From the age of seventeen, I have journaled. Sometimes I journaled with the zest and fire of a man with something to say which needed to escape and make its way onto the page (i.e. after a breakup); and sometimes it was with the boredom and droll of an overgrown boy who’d rather be playing Goldeneye on his Nintendo 64 (i.e. mostly during college). But I would write. I’d write poems, write down fragments of stories, vent about anything, or just journal my own struggles and issues. No matter how much, how little or even what I wrote, my journals served as a thin lifeline to the writer I always wished to become. That creek-bed of inspiration wasn’t enough to warrant a bridge for crossing, but it was water nonetheless, and I never let it dry completely over the span of nearly ten years.

Three years ago, that creek became a stream as I started a blog about professional topics of interest.² I have a steadily growing number of subscribers and have managed to get the attention of a few notable people in my industry from whom I crave approval and of whom you’ve likely never heard. That’s been a satisfying exercise, and, in tandem with the writing I do often for my job, keeps me feeling as though I am actively using the gifts and talents with which I believe God has blessed me. I plan to continue that blog for as long as I can because I am passionate about the work I do and the organization for which I work. But the writer always wants more. The seven year old in me wants to tell new stories, not just arrange words in new ways.

So, this last November, I signed up for NaNoWriMo. I discovered NaNoWriMo back in 2005 and was fascinated with the idea of writing a novel in a compressed period of time. I work much better under a deadline and thought that 50,000 words in thirty days was just the crazy thing I needed to turn that stream into a small river.

It worked. As a first-time participant, I wrote over 54,000 words and completed the draft for my first novel. And the best part about it was that I loved every moment that I was sitting at my computer way too early in the morning and pounding out prose that only a mother could love³. I felt centered; connected to who I am and who I am meant to be. It was exhilarating.

And it was easy⁴. I didn’t want to sleep for 5 days after I finished my novel, I wanted to keep going. To write to 80k, 100k and beyond. It was then that writing became more than a hobby or some silly dream for me. It became an obsession. Something I wanted to continue and cause to increase, in both volume and quality.

Now I am editing my novel, which I plan to complete in the first part of 2008. Over the past several weeks, as I have shifted from the joy of drafting to the bloodletting of editing, I’ve managed to maintain that obsession, which I see as a good sign considering how much needs to change in my first draft. I’ve also decided that it’s time to put the writerly side of myself online. So I created this site dedicated to writing and becoming a writer, which is nothing short of a redemptive experience for me (thus the title of this blog, but more on that later). My goal is to have a place where I can share and reflect on my journey to this point, share in the joy and pain yet to come as I continue to write, and to learn from the many talented artists of all walks whom I’ve already encountered online and in life. I only hope that your brilliance will rub off on me in the crossing of bits and bytes.

It’s been a long introduction, I know, but I’ve got twenty-two years of history which led me to this. You got the short and pithy version; stick around and you’ll get the long and drawn-out version over time.

It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I can’t wait to create great art with you. You’ll need to do the drawing and painting, of course.

- Brandon

While writing this, I was listening to “Almost Flew” by Jeff Caylor

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1. At least, I think it was when I was seven. This assertion is based purely on my memory. This was long before Twitter, so I am not 100% certain what I was doing those days [↩]
2. I am an Enterprise Architect for Compassion International, a Child Sponsorship Ministry based in Colorado Springs, CO and my blog, User InExperience, is about Technology and Enterprise Architecture [↩]
3. Sarah loves it too, but she doesn’t have to [↩]
4. Easy does not in this case mean that the work produced was good. Just that it was easy to write over 50,000 words of clunky dialogue, incoherent descriptions and repetitive exposition [↩]

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