My name is Ben Haskett. I’m an assistant deputy appellate court clerk during the day. I enjoy writing. On a good night, after dinner is consumed and the kids are in bed, I might manage to sit down for 20 minutes and cobble together about 300 words. On other nights, I won’t get the chance to write, but I might get a chance to reflect on the 300 words I wrote the day before.
Saturdays are the best nights. On these magical evenings, I slink away to the “office” (read: the room in our house with a computer in it), shotgun a Rockstar, and then bang out a few thousand words before whatever’s in that caffeine potion wears off and I begin drooling.
Rinse and repeat. It’s a slow process.
If you take the word author by its most literal definition, then I suppose I am an author. I’m not rushing out to Office Max to get perforated business cards or anything, but I’m enjoying the fun, creativity, and flexibility that comes with writing.
In 2016, I got a notion to write a book and then, over the next six months, actually managed to pull all these 300- and 2000-word snippets together and form a semi-coherent, 50,000-word salad that I tricked people into believing was a “book.”
Or, well… I don’t know why I’m being self-deprecatory. It felt like quite an accomplishment, actually, starting and finishing a short novel that was competent and relatively free of typos. If you’re curious about The Waypoint, you can check it out here.
I’m happy with the way it turned out, and I admittedly feel a little pride when I see the book cover. I’m not sure if I’m proud because of the quality of the writing or just because it’s a thing that I started and finished. It’s probably somewhere in the middle.
In early 2017, I ran a small Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money for an audio book version. Thankfully, it was successful, and my pal Cody Parcell did a great job reading the book. So now, it’s available on Audible, which is pretty cool.
Now I’m working on my second story, A Troll and his Bard, and at 67,000 words, I’m more than halfway through.
The title of this website, This is Me Now, is in reference to an episode of Bob’s Burgers:
Writing was not the first thing I discovered I really enjoy, and it may not be the last. I have a tendency to find a new hobby and then obsess over it until I’m sick of it and can’t stand it anymore (Hello, board game publishing, board game designing, and guitar). Will this happen with writing? We’ll see, but I don’t think so—most of my previous hobbies have required that I write, and sometimes that’s been my favorite part. Now I’m just doing that more than the other stuff.