The Vegas Letters

Hi. My name is Brandon Weiss. I like to think that I lead a relatively normal life. It was more normal four years ago; not all that much has changed, I don’t think.

Four years ago, I was a graduate student in philosophy and an aspiring writer. I spent hours every day doing nothing but writing. I was getting very good at it, but I’d never had anything published. I’d written about a dozen novels, but again, none of them published. In addition to writing and going to school, every Friday and Saturday night I would role-play. Basically, that means I would pretend to be a vampire for a few hours while hanging out with other friends that were also pretending to be vampires. It’s a kind of free form acting thing, and it’s a real blast. We’d live out these stories that we told together, and then we’d go out and talk about the night at some diner somewhere.

It made the weekend the highlight of my life. I was getting more and more immersed into both the writing and the role-playing, because I really hated school. When I was in college, philosophy had been awesome. I got to read and talk about some of the coolest ideas in the world, and I got to argue about some of the most cutting edge ideas out there. But when I got to grad school, I found I’d chosen a school that wasn’t much into the cutting edge position. It was like they were stuck in the first half of the twentieth century. And for the record, a paper published in ninety-eight that was talking about an idea from the thirties is still stuck in the first half of the twentieth century.

There was nothing new there for me. When I went back to my undergraduate school and told one of the professors there what I was reading, he looked at me like I was crazy. “Why?” He asked. “We’ve known they’re wrong for twenty years.” That really put things into perspective for me.

I had started to hate philosophy.

So I was pretty miserable. Then I found out that my school has a creative writing masters of fine arts program. To get into that, all I had to do was hand them my writing sample and apply. Then I could spend two years doing nothing but writing. I thought that if I couldn’t become a successful writer, maybe I could at least have a great time trying and learning to write even better than I already did. So I applied.

I figured that as long as I was applying for a creative writing degree, I might as well try to get published again. It had been a few years since I’d sent anything but a few short stories off into the market, and I knew my skills had been more finely honed since then. So I started fishing for both agents and publishers.

The creative writing MFA is supposed to be a two-year program. I’m still in it four years later, and I’m barely more than halfway done. It isn’t that I’m failing or anything. I’m just going deliberately slow. I don’t have the time to take many classes anymore.

See, when I started fishing, I caught. A lot.

In the four years since I started, I’ve published sixteen novels, two short story anthologies, three plays, and I’ve just recently finished my fourth screenplay. The school doesn’t pay me to be a TA anymore, but they don’t charge me tuition. They like having me there, and they love that I’m willing to teach classes here and there. And I am. I’m teaching what I love to do without having the degree to back it up. I’ve always loved to teach, and the years as a TA will help me get a job teaching when I do finally finish the program. Assuming I want one. It doesn’t matter that they’re getting my teaching for free, my name recognition for free. I don’t exactly need the money, after all; not anymore.

But I can really only handle one class a semester. That class is always a seminar, and I have to make sure that the one I’m teaching meets the same day. So this semester, every Wednesday, I have two classes. One of them I sit in, the other one I teach. The rest of the week, I’m free to do whatever I want. Or, usually, whatever my agent wants me to do.

I remember when I met Julia. She’s my agent. Julia Shields. She wasn’t the first one to contact me when I sent out all my information, but she was the first one to follow up with a phone call. We talked, she told me that she was a starting agent, but that she had a lot of contacts. She also told me that she didn’t take clients easily, and wanted to talk to me, if I was willing. She really liked my work. That is usually enough to get me to be willing to talk to people. It’s not that I’m hugely arrogant. I mean, I am, when it comes to my writing. But it’s not like I need people to inflate my ego. It’s big enough already. It’s just that when someone really likes my work, really believes in it, I feel more like there’s some kind of connection between us. After all, writing is basically an act of telepathy between a writer and a reader, to paraphrase Steven King.

When we met, and she took me to lunch (another point in her favor), she asked me just how far I was willing to go for my work. I still remember what I said. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” I told her. “If you want me to go to conventions, I’ll go to conventions. Book signings I can do. Speaking tours? I know how to talk. Radio or television appearances? Done. You tell me what I need to do to publicize enough to be on the best seller list, and I’ll tell you how soon I can do it.”

She smiled. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear,” she said. She was my agent by the end of the meal. We got it all on paper within a few days of the meeting.

Since then, she’s really held me to my promise. She has me working my ass off doing more than just the physical work of writing.

So now I have most of the week to do things like going to conventions. I write primarily in the science fiction and horror genres, so there’s no shortage of conventions to go to. I’d probably be annoyed by them, if I wasn’t such a geek myself. But luckily, I’ve always been the kind of guy who loves that sort of thing. I love going to the conventions as much as anybody else. Being featured at some part of the conventions always helps me get closer to the people I’m obsessively impressed by. It helps to get autographs and have conversations with my heroes when they think that I’m one of them, and not one of the fan boys in the audience.

Oh, the other great thing is that the organization of gamers I belong to has games all over the country. So chances are, when I’m out of town for the weekend, I still get to role-play. And as my same character. I get to take full advantage of the system and the way everything’s already spread out. It’s great.

Okay. That concludes the prelude portion of our program. This is where I am now. The story will begin presently. I just wanted to set the stage for you a little bit. I’m about to tell you my story, which means it’s the most important event in my life so far.

They say that every good story is the most important event in the character’s life so far. This is my story, making me the character. Which makes this the most important event in my life so far. Previous winners have included the lunch with Julia, graduating college, losing my virginity, graduating high school, getting my first car, and birth. This one is bigger than all of those.

This is the story of how I fell in love.