My writing career began in a miserable blur in the bowels of early MySpace, then Facebook, and stayed that way until I killed it a couple of years ago. It’s been a long, strange trip – mostly because I insisted at the moment – but the trip needed to end.

I’m slowly cleaning out all remnants of my decade long drunken autobiography known as C. Derick Miller. Life is beginning to feel as though it has meaning. I’m feeling a sense of love and hope that I don’t recall having in adulthood. All it took was a three-year dry-out from ten years of semi-talented debauchery.

I killed dreams, disappointed little faces, trashed marriages, and ruined friendships like a rock star without a stage. It’ll be a page in someone else’s book because I don’t recall enough details to make a coherent story. My older books are blurbs somehow translated into English.

Disclaimer: the above paragraph is not a pardon for those who did their part.

If I’m lucky, he’s gone for good. I am appearing at my first book festival via invitation as an author and small press. I’m a guest rather than a vendor, and I believe I’m on the farthest end of the “darkness” spectrum there. I’m gonna attract all the cool kids. In all seriousness, these facts hit me today, and I’m flattered.

At some point, somewhere, someone noticed me without actually noticing “me”. I wasn’t screaming, waving, shouting, standing atop a table shaking my groove-thang, or doing The Macarena. Someone read one of my works and believed I should be in attendance. Someone I’ve never met.

My mantra for the past year was to begin doing things for the billions of readers throughout the world who haven’t met me.

For those who have met me: If you played a hand in helping me reach this point in my writing career despite me and my shenanigans to tank the whole thing, thank you. I’m sorry for all those crazy things I said and did while I was drunk that one decade.

We still can’t hang out, though. This only works if I stay in my sober-cage, and it’s possible to get intoxicated on memories. Law of the universe and such.