Look and Listen

Biography

First of all, Coolidge Bligh is my pseudonym, not my real name. I am not a professional writer, although I have been paid to write and edit in the past. For now I am working on a Master's degree to become a psychologist/psychiatrist and am employed at a small community college, but only part-time for a number of different reasons. Secondly, I am kind of a strange blend of different things. I have spent more than half my life in the North and a bit less than half in the South (I was born in the South, in Virginia to be exact, but my parents are Yankees from Michigan, and we moved back here when I was nine--I have tried unsuccessfully since then to escape elsewhere, with the exception of one year back in Virginia); one side of my family is liberal, the other is conservative; I have been both the fastest runner on my high school track and cross country teams, and the sickest invalid in my circle of friends and acquaintances as a college student; I am both an obsessive worrywart and a cold, calculating, laidback analyzer and gamer; I have been an angry, bitter agnostic and a very strong, committed Christian. This means I am either terribly schizophrenic or in the perfect position to write more objectively and effectively, but also passionately, about the world around us. Conflict is a constant, indeed chronic aspect of my life and of my writing. I am never at peace, ironically, unless I am at war with some injustice, some illness, some pain or problem, some person, some misconception that needs to be rectified. I suppose this is why I have a tendency to write more about war and history than about anything else, and even when I do write science fiction or contemporary fiction or something else, my stories are rife with conflict, adventure, tragedy, and irony. I look for that in real-life history, and I often find it. I have radar for the stuff, I suppose. I look forward to having people read my novels or stories on here. Please be honest and straightforward; I give as good as I get, and have made a habit of surrounding myself with friends and colleagues who are very different than me, and with whom I can get into the habit of butting heads in the right way. Thank you for stopping by my page. I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Inspiration

I tend to believe that writers are influenced equally by life circumstances and readings of authors' works. For me the former have often been quite painful: I had to move from an idyllic home in Virginia at the impressionable age of nine (research shows that nine years old is the worst possible age for a child to have something traumatic happen, because he/she is right at that difficult transition from ignorant child to fully conscientious/aware preteen/teenager); I have had a pair of comorbid chronic medical conditions since I was 11 years old; I had difficult relationships with a conflicted father and an insensitive older brother; I have had painful experiences related to church, college, and romantic relationships; and I have struggled to find meaningful peer relationships or decent work, and have been forced to rely largely on the generosity of my father and mother, who see things very differently than I, largely because of the fact that they are both 40, rather than 20 or 30 years, older than me. They do not understand my world, and I do not understand theirs. They are no worse than me because they are older and more conservative, and I am certainly no worse than them because I am younger and more liberal/libertarian. My father's personal interest in history and government has been passed on to me, although I have developed it in my own obsessive and unique ways--I am more a student of the older things like the Napoleonic and Victorian eras, whereas my father prefers the modern age, particularly World War II and beyond; my grandfather's service in the U.S. Navy during World War II has also caused me to care deeply about my nation and its military heritage. As for authors, I run the gamut. Charles Dickens is my favorite, of course, with distant seconds being William Faulkner (very different, I know), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, and others. The Bible is of course my staple since I am a Christian, though a very poor one, and while I am not a fundamentalist or perhaps even an evangelical, I do take my faith seriously and am trying to learn more about it now that I have somewhat recovered from the aforementioned "angry, bitter agnostic" years of my early 20s. (Does anyone not have those, honestly?) I find more power and meaning in one line of Biblical writing than in a paragraph or page of most other books, even by the greatest authors of the greatest books. As for other books that have profoundly affected me, my all-time favorite novel "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, made more of an impact on me than I can possibly describe or discuss here, and it indeed influenced me to pen my first novel, "The Keystone," which is a different take on Gettysburg. My best friend from high school, who has a degree in art and is an amazing artist and designer himself, did each and every illustration for that first novel before I published it via CreateSpace and Kindle. Visiting Civil War battlefields was also a huge inspiration, and remains one to this day, as is reading other Civil War books about Gettysburg and other battles and subjects. I have read an equal smattering of fiction and nonfiction books about the war. My favorite other than "The Killer Angels" is probably the novel "Lincoln" by Gore Vidal, which was incredibly epic and believable. Abraham Lincoln is my hero and my role model, so of course I look to him--quite literally, in the form of posters and statuettes in my study--for wisdom and guidance. "All Quiet on the Western Front," while I read it at a very young age, was influential and probably led me unconsciously to pen my second novel, "City of Lace," which is also available via CreateSpace and Kindle. I also have been fascinated and touched by the stories of the Christmas Truce and other World War I events, so that contributed too. I have also read a couple of Michael Shaara's son Jeff Shaara's historical fiction novels, and even had my scholarship to attend Gettysburg College's Civil War Institute in 2002 paid by Mr. Shaara. My third book, a Civil War vampire novella entitled "Darcloch" which I have temporarily abandoned until I feel a stronger sense of direction with the manuscript, was largely influenced by Bram Stoker's "Dracula," Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (which I declare to be the Great American Novel) and a poem by Melville about his journalist experiences in Virginia during the Civil War, Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," and a more obscure autobiographical book called "Mosby's Memoirs" by the Confederate Civil War raider John Singleton Mosby of Virginia. Despite its many influences, "Darcloch" is much shorter than my first two novels, but that is largely because it is a complicated text and will be published in five parts if I ever finish it. Doubtful right now. Thus far, I have only released Part I, only about 100 pages in length. My first novel, "The Keystone," is 200 pages exactly, and my second novel, "City of Lace," is around 140. I would like to add two or more sections to that around Christmastime later this year to make it a fuller, better text (since it is a Christmas-themed novel).