So, I guess I will begin with where it all began. Not the alpha of all things, just my thing. I have been, at least since the second grade when my teacher started yelling at me about daydreaming all the time and being lazy, announcing to the world that someday I'll be a writer. I had some early luck actually, publishing a book 10 years ago titled NOTES FROM MANHATTAN which is available on AMAZON.COM and if you have any interest in seeing a young struggling writer's work please check it out.
Now I taught creative writing for 9 years at Gateway High School in Aurora Colorado. I loved it! Working with students who had a basically negative attitude about school, learning, and their upcoming adult middle class existance, my class - known as the Siminoe Coffee House - was a place for students to express, write, rhyme, film, or well, just about anything they had a mind to create. I really put my soul into the class and into keeping it free for the students. So many of them inspired me! So many of them were everything I wished I could be.
As a teacher I made very little money and since I was divorced I found myself needing a lot of cash to take care of things. I worked a side job, not exactly legal, but suffice it to say I worked in the sports accounting field for a few years and saved up every penny I could squeeze from it in order to stage not only an escape from my life, but a rebirth of sorts.
I loved my teaching, but students came and went and my ideas were becoming stagnant and I was not improving my teaching I was rehashing it. I also failed to answer my students' questions about "What have you written lately, Mr. Siminoe?" because I was embarassed to say my creativity was being drained by writing their prompts and grading and proofing their work. I was not writing anymore. Between the sports and the teaching I had very little left.
A journey to visit my former student MOD in Thailand would give me the beginnings of a plan. I needed, as Hemingway had needed or Henry Miller, to travel and to depart native lands for new experiences and FIND MY VOICE AGAIN!
I moved to Thailand 5 years ago, leaving everything in the states behind in my quest to write again. It didn't go well at first. I tried to start a business so I could have income while writing, but the business failed misserably and now I am a foreigner, broke, and in truth unable to go back to the USA where the cost of living makes it impossible to be an artist. I live here for next to nothing. My appartment is $200 a month. I eat light. I try to live cheap. I need to do what I can to give my writing another chance!
Things are looking up now. I teach again, but a less hectic schedule at SATIT KASET INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM has allowed me to write. I enjoy my new teaching with small classes and fairly light course loads.
I have finished 3 novels in the past 2 years. I am happy just to write them really. However, I am fortunate to announce that my pet project, a book I poored my heart into as it was about my father and his passing from cancer, has found a publisher. Bangkok Book House will be publishing the novel in 2007. Actually I am just signing the contract today and mailing it back to them. I plan to journal a great deal about this experience. Publishing my first book was sort of no big deal because it was a comedy and really just for fun.
ECHO POOL is the name of my new novel and I am very proud of the work. Many of my friends from the past and present are depicted in the novel; however, the names and such have been changed to protect all of us despite our lack of innocence. My father is the true hero of the piece as he was the true hero in my life. Losing him to cancer nearly 6 years ago has affected me in ways I could not have imagined. It is so simple to say we don't know what we have or what someone is until we lose them, and yet as simple as it is it doesn't change the fact that it is in loss that we find.
I will post some excerpts from the novel. I also will toss up a few short stories about my adopted home, the Kingdom of Thailand. In general life here is relaxed, beautiful, warm, and easy. But there is drama beneath the surface of these smiling people and I intent to write about it and show everything I can. Things I have explored, wondered about, and learned.
I would love to have people check out NOTES FROM MANHATTAN on AMAZON, but I must say the story is comedy and I really don't do that kind of writing any longer. Still, if you want to support a starving artist, toss down a couple bucks and buy a copy of Notes. I promise you'll get a few laughs out of it if nothing else.
