Hello fellow members of AW. Since I'm new here, I figured I'd take a moment to introduce myself.
My name is Dane O'Leary. Friends (and my academic advisor) call me Danger. I'm a writer, an atheist, and a graphic designer, in that order.
I'm kind of a renaissance man, a Jack-of-all-trades. My degrees are in psychology and anthropology with minors and additional study in graphic and web design, public relations, creative writing, journalism, and biology. My family hails from the Baltimore-Washington metro area, but I've also lived in Brooklyn, Virginia, and Mississippi. You could say I'm a Yankee with a love for the South.
I have moderate obsessions with coffee -- good coffee I should say -- and portmanteaus. My favorite books are Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Death from the Skies by Dr Philip Plait, among others, mostly non-fiction and classic literature.
I'm also quite fond of music. You rarely find me not listening to it or wearing my headphones. My musical taste is eclectic and varied, but I tend to listen to alternative, indie-pop (think Tegan and Sara), rock, hip-hop, some mainstream bubblegum-esque pop, and rock and punk-rock from the late 60s and 70s.
I don't watch much television although I do like American Horror Story. For movies, I like horror, action, thriller, and comedy. Sometimes drama can be okay if the romance doesn't make me ill and it's not based on a book by Nicholas Sparks.
As for my writing background, I've been writing since I could hold a pencil. It started out as short stories, frequently I'd pick out the bits and pieces of stories that I liked and put them together into my own stories. As I got older and gained more life experience, my writing developed and I noticed I was writing either non-fiction essays or autobiographical fiction, which I'm told reads like a memoir but it only ever inspired by my life. I don't write verbatim retellings.
I've been working on my first novel, an autobiographical literary fiction, for close to five years now. I worked on it for my first year participating in NaNoWriMo in 2011 and although I met the 50k word goal, I didn't finish the novel. As I got closer to the end, it got harder and harder to write; I knew how I wanted and needed it to end, but it just wouldn't come together. So I decided to start over and write it from the beginning again. This process repeated a couple more times, and each time I'd get stuck earlier and earlier. After some thought and receiving such amazing praise for the excerpts of that first manuscript that I've posted around the web, I've decided to go back to that first manuscript and try once again to finish it.
I have several friends who've published, both independent and traditional, and they've all told me to start a platform, to put my writing out there, gain readers, create a following. They've said many publishers today look for writers who can self-promote and market themselves and their work. So I took my old, neglected blog, gave it a face-lift, and am in the process of making it my writer's page, a website containing all my writing that will consist of: movie, book and music reviews; science and tech articles; writing tips, guides and updates; personal anecdotes; thoughts on the creative and writing processes; among other things.
Right now you can find my blog here, but I plan to have a new domain for it sometime next week.
[For future reference, my current URL is http://DaneAlexanderWriting.blogspot.com]
I'm happy to be here and meet all of you, and I look forward to sharing my work and reading some of yours as well.
See you around.
Dane
My name is Dane O'Leary. Friends (and my academic advisor) call me Danger. I'm a writer, an atheist, and a graphic designer, in that order.
I'm kind of a renaissance man, a Jack-of-all-trades. My degrees are in psychology and anthropology with minors and additional study in graphic and web design, public relations, creative writing, journalism, and biology. My family hails from the Baltimore-Washington metro area, but I've also lived in Brooklyn, Virginia, and Mississippi. You could say I'm a Yankee with a love for the South.
I have moderate obsessions with coffee -- good coffee I should say -- and portmanteaus. My favorite books are Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Death from the Skies by Dr Philip Plait, among others, mostly non-fiction and classic literature.
I'm also quite fond of music. You rarely find me not listening to it or wearing my headphones. My musical taste is eclectic and varied, but I tend to listen to alternative, indie-pop (think Tegan and Sara), rock, hip-hop, some mainstream bubblegum-esque pop, and rock and punk-rock from the late 60s and 70s.
I don't watch much television although I do like American Horror Story. For movies, I like horror, action, thriller, and comedy. Sometimes drama can be okay if the romance doesn't make me ill and it's not based on a book by Nicholas Sparks.
As for my writing background, I've been writing since I could hold a pencil. It started out as short stories, frequently I'd pick out the bits and pieces of stories that I liked and put them together into my own stories. As I got older and gained more life experience, my writing developed and I noticed I was writing either non-fiction essays or autobiographical fiction, which I'm told reads like a memoir but it only ever inspired by my life. I don't write verbatim retellings.
I've been working on my first novel, an autobiographical literary fiction, for close to five years now. I worked on it for my first year participating in NaNoWriMo in 2011 and although I met the 50k word goal, I didn't finish the novel. As I got closer to the end, it got harder and harder to write; I knew how I wanted and needed it to end, but it just wouldn't come together. So I decided to start over and write it from the beginning again. This process repeated a couple more times, and each time I'd get stuck earlier and earlier. After some thought and receiving such amazing praise for the excerpts of that first manuscript that I've posted around the web, I've decided to go back to that first manuscript and try once again to finish it.
I have several friends who've published, both independent and traditional, and they've all told me to start a platform, to put my writing out there, gain readers, create a following. They've said many publishers today look for writers who can self-promote and market themselves and their work. So I took my old, neglected blog, gave it a face-lift, and am in the process of making it my writer's page, a website containing all my writing that will consist of: movie, book and music reviews; science and tech articles; writing tips, guides and updates; personal anecdotes; thoughts on the creative and writing processes; among other things.
Right now you can find my blog here, but I plan to have a new domain for it sometime next week.
[For future reference, my current URL is http://DaneAlexanderWriting.blogspot.com]
I'm happy to be here and meet all of you, and I look forward to sharing my work and reading some of yours as well.
See you around.
Dane
Last edited:
Dane!
