What is Reedy Creek?

I am nostalgic. To a fault, some might say. Growing up you learn the world truly
doesn’t give a shit about what your intentions are, your aspirations. Any bromides suggesting fate is your companion, proposing your purpose in the grand scheme of things means something important is just the fortune-cookie platitudes of the indifferent. If there were any truth to the Reach for the Stars mantras so prevalent during your formative years, I would be the starting pitcher for the Red Sox. Or a best-selling author. So one might say my nostalgia is the result of failed intentions, a sort of backward longing for a time when the world could be my oyster and every conceivable option was still permissible. Or nostalgia is just the bedfellow of a lazy prick. Either way, writing’s become my means of combatting how cruel the world can be by re-presenting its perfunctory maliciousness as something I am able to control. In the author’s mind, anything is real. Anything can happen. Hell, it was a writer or creative mind that even put pen to paper to assume greatness awaits all who seek it. So destiny, in and of itself, is an authorial construct, something developed that sounds good in the real world, but whose meaning is truly beneficial and applicable in the world of stories.

Stephen King wrote a book called IT. This novel and I have always shared a connection; when I was six or seven, I remembered seeing this cinder block in binding on my dad’s bookshelf, thicker than the others, commanding some sort of abstract focus of my own curiosity. I would often look at its cover page, the grim painting of a wet gutter channeling trickles of rainwater and bobbing a child’s paraffin newspaper boat toward the sewer grate, where a reptilian claw protruded like a monstrous death knell waiting to pull the schooner into the depths. The image terrified me. I often drew it. Wondered what was contained inside that enormous sheaf of pages that would make sense of that visual. One of the pages was mysteriously torn out of the glued binding, and it remained tucked in place like a cannibalized bookmark. I would later learn that loose paper marked the last page my mom would ever read, denoting IT had won in achieving the sort of fear that could prompt a grown woman to deface a book in defiance of its content. I wouldn’t read IT until I was eighteen. This book, whose mystery would prove seminal to my own childhood and then bookend my adolescence, patterned its own narrative with a similar disposition, pairing perspectives between the protagonists’ adulthoods and childhoods.

It was a phenomenal read. And its story would linger with me for many years. Stephen King has that sort of draw. His Dark Tower saga was my principal inspiration to write the David Hollow Trilogy, and The Shining was the reason I even put pen to paper to try my hand at story-telling when I was in high school. But there IT remained. My favorite of the bunch. Perhaps it was the characters; those seven kids in the 50’s, churning out fragments of King’s own childhood. The events read rather personal to me. They would have to. Considering the book itself breaches 1000 pages, comports itself on different timelines and invents a history and town out of whole cloth, King would have to share a connection with those characters beyond the grand pinnings of his imagination. They would have to be born of his own nostalgia. Which brings me to Reedy Creek. What is it?

Reedy Creek is my own expression of nostalgia on the page. I grew up in the 80s, and so this is where I’ve taken the story. The summer of 1988, told mostly through the eyes of four twelve year-old boys with a fascination for baseball and trading cards. But the town itself, Reedy Creek, is truly an amalgam of certain memories about my old neighborhood where I grew up. Like Derry in IT, Reedy Creek doesn’t exist as any formal town proper on the American Corn Belt. It is distinctly Americana in that it represents some of the truest natures of what one might expect of a farming community opening its doors to the industrial endeavors of big city machinations. Where Stephen King and I part—beyond the relevancy of name, the celebrity, the published oeuvre, the critical and financial success, the movies, politics—is I lack the actual motivation to write. One cannot forever be aspiring. So this site is an experiment; it’s an incentive. It puts the writer and the reader in the same corner, allowing the latter to witness the creation of the first draft of a novel from the ground up. Each week demands a new chapter. And so each new week demands creativity of, and most importantly, content from the author.

Me. So there are no more excuses.

Join me. And together we can make Reedy Creek a reality.