I was twelve or thirteen when we got our first home computer. It was a bulky Gateway 2000 that arrived in the house in three large boxes printed with black-and-white spots like a Holstein. It occupied a table all of its own in our family room and the six of us took turns prodding its various functions to determine what it could do.
I quickly discovered the joys of a word processor. Up until then, all “fancy” writing had to be punched out on an outdated electric typewriter that hummed like a turbine and smelled like a nun. Starchy. Unforgiving. But to use a word processor was to experience transcendence itself. Day after day, I found myself drawn to the enthralling glow of the computer monitor where the cursor beckoned to me, blinking silent and serene like the beacon of a lighthouse on an endless white sea.
There I would sit for hours, unblinking, pecking out prose with two fingers while my imagination spun elaborate tales about witches and adventurers and something to do with dragons. I didn’t have the slightest idea where the story was going and I didn’t care. I was just going to keep writing until I found out.
My first goal was to fill a whole page. I accomplished this with a sense of immense satisfaction and was pleased when a new blank page appeared all by itself. The progress bar on the right side of the screen told me I was halfway there. I didn’t know where there was, or how long it would take me to reach it, but I didn’t much care.
I filled a second page. Two-thirds of the way there. This writing thing was a cinch! I was going to have a book in to time. I’d sell it for a million dollars and we’d have enough money to renovate the house so I could once again have my own bedroom instead of having to share one with my younger sister.
“How long are you going to keep writing?” the grown-ups asked, probably with more than a hint of when are you going to get off the computer so the rest of us can use it? in their tone, undetected by me.
“Till the scroll bar reaches the bottom,” I answered, confident that this was normal to want and possible to achieve. Some time later, I was embarrassed to learn I might as well have said “until I touch the horizon.” Each time I reached the bottom of the page, a new page would appear, and each time a new page appeared the scroll bar bobbed upward another tiny increment, hovering tantalizingly close to the bottom without ever touching it.
My dragon adventure became a space adventure. My space adventure became an Elizabethan drama, a graphic novel, a gritty noir. My stories turned to college essays, launching me into an undergraduate program for Theatre and Art at Illinois Wesleyan University. College papers intermingled with plays and comedy sketches.
The scroll bar still hadn’t touched bottom.
Once I graduated into the real world, the plays evolved into screenplays, which evolved into short films. I’d always wanted to be a filmmaker, and now that I was a Certified Adult, living in my own apartment, working a grown-up day job, no one could stop me. I had no formal film training, but never mind: I would figure it out on my own. I started an independent film production company and proceeded to produce four or five films of extravagant zeal and fair-to-middling production value.
The scroll bar still hadn’t touched bottom.
It was about this point that I decided I’d probably better get some actual film production training. My screenplays evolved into grad school essays as I relocated across the country to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of Southern California. This, I was certain, was the boost I needed to launch myself into a dream career as a Hollywood Big Shot. Fame and Fortune were assuredly just around the corner. I just needed a teensy little day-job to, you know, pay the bills while I waited.
I found work doing data entry for a payroll company, a far cry from red carpets and three-picture deals. But, no matter, it left me plenty of time to write. I turned to prose and spent the hours of my daily commute writing the novel which would eventually become the “Enfant Terrible” series. I published the books and transitioned from ‘writer’ to ‘author.’
By the time Covid hit I had transitioned from data entry to production management and found work on animated films at a series of studios with recognizable names. Paramount. Warner Brothers. Skydance. I’d done it. I’d made it. It wasn’t as glamorous as I’d imagined, there’s not a lot of pizzazz in production management, but I liked the work and I still had time to write.
Still have time to write.
The scroll bar still hasn’t touched bottom. The cursor keeps calling me back to the endless white seas of the blank page waiting to be filled. I don’t have the slightest idea where the story of my life is going, but ultimately, I don’t care: I’m just going to keep writing until I find out.
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Title: Enfant Terrible: Opening Acts
Author: Gwydhar Gebien
Genre: Literary Fiction / Contemporary Fiction
Book Blurb:
Damen Warner is the front man for a metalcore band who has hit the skids. Hard. His record label dropped him, his manager has gone missing and now his agent won’t return his calls. He is broke and homeless, and his career is deader than rock and roll.
And worse—he’s thirty.
In a last-ditch effort to revive his career, Damen returns to Chicago on the promise of playing Lollapalooza and his life quickly spirals into a vortex of sex, drugs, rock and roll, colorful language, explicit content and poor taste.
Antagonizing everyone in his path, Damen struggles to reinvent himself and to come to terms with his estranged family as he plummets face first to rock bottom.
Excerpt
“Dude, you’re viral,” my rhythm guitarist, Gorey, stuck his phone between my face and the windshield to show me a gif playing on an endless loop.
“Dude, I’m driving!” I knocked his hand away, struggling not to swerve across all available lanes of traffic. It didn’t take more than a glance for me to know it was a video of the debacle with the TSA. I stole a second glance at the screen out of the corner of my eye.
Damen Warner Bares it All!
Yup. Definitely me. I watched myself turn toward the camera: my mouth forming the words ‘f--- off’ again, and again, and again. Someone had added a black bar over my junk: the fig leaf of the digital age.
“D’you make that?” I asked.
“Pfft. No. I got people for that.”
“We don’t have ‘people’ anymore,” I reminded him. “Remember? The Robot Overlords cut us loose.”
It was true. We were careening toward effing Chicago in a battered cargo van that smelled like farts; the same van we’d packed up thirteen years ago to haul our asses to Los Angeles in search of fame and fortune. The passenger side was emblazoned with our band’s handle: the letters OBNXS scrawled out in lurid blue spray paint. Below this, someone had helpfully added “SUCKS”.
God, I hated my life.
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Author Biography:
GWYDHAR GEBIEN (Pronounced Gwed-ra Gay-bin)Gwydhar Gebien is a writer, an artist and a filmmaker; originally from Chicago now transplanted in Los Angeles in pursuit of a career in film production.With a background in theatre from Illinois Wesleyan University and a master's degree in film production from University of Southern California she is putting her training to good use at Skydance Animation.An eldritch creature of introverted disposition, Gwydhar, lives a quiet life in a pink house with her husband and a cat and a minivan, but can occasionally be coaxed out into the open with music, snacks, or a single-malt whisky.
Social Media Links:
Title: Enfant Terrible: Headliner
Author: Gwydhar Gebien
Genre: Literary Fiction / Contemporary Fiction
Book Blurb:
Damen Warner, the washed-up front man for the metalcore band OBNXS, is determined to do whatever it takes to wrench his career out of obscurity. All he has to do is come up with mind-blowing, boner-inducing, panty-dropping original material.
No pressure.
In an effort to claw his way back to stardom, he teams up with a well-connected but underhanded investor to produce a new album, and his life quickly spirals into a widening gyre of depravity and mayhem. But when he is unexpectedly cast in the role of a father figure to his girlfriend’s five-year-old daughter, he finds himself torn between fame and fatherhood as he continues his odyssey of self-destruction down the path of good intentions and bad behavior.
Excerpt
Now that the band was back together, I turned my attention to the task of writing a new album. We were overdue for some new material, and without a record label breathing down our necks, we had nearly unlimited creative control over our work for the first time since our garage band days; we could play whatever we wanted without regard for marketability or consumer demographics. All we had to do was write it.
Easy.
The music hovered all around me, pressing in on me from all sides, so close I could feel it. I could taste it.
I hit a note.
Wrong!
I hit a chord.
Wrong!
I tried a progression.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
The notes were worthless and stupid. The chords were worthless and stupid. I was worthless and stupid, playing the same worthless, stupid progression over and over again, hoping it would resolve into something meaningful. The definition of insanity.
I banged my face down on the keyboard in frustration.
“Ohmigod, give it a rest, already!” Behind her drum kit, Jojo had her hands pressed over her ears like she was in physical pain.
“What even is music, anyway?” I mumbled, my face still ringing out a tone cluster in the key of desperation.
“Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t that.”
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Title: Enfant Terrible: Showstopper
Author: Gwydhar Gebien
Genre: Literary Fiction / Contemporary Fiction
Book Blurb:
Damen Warner is ready for a fresh start. After spiraling into alcoholic depression as the result of his grandmother’s death he plans to start the new year right. Thanks to his newfound notoriety as an internet sensation, Damen and his band, OBNXS, return to the studio to record their next album. But as his professional career takes off, Damen quickly discovers that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Forced to balance his professional aspirations against his deepening relationship with his girlfriend Melody and her five-year-old daughter, Damen quickly finds himself tangled in a web of controversy and chaos that threatens everything he loves.
As he fights to keep his band, his relationship, and his sanity from unravelling, Damen struggles to confront his attitudes toward family and fatherhood, and to grow up—or die trying.
Excerpt
Sam’s office was a monument to sophistication and taste that looked like it had come out of the Gilded Age. The walls were paneled in dark wood, and the chairs were upholstered in tufted leather. Every surface was polished to a high gloss. My reflection stared back at me from half a dozen gleaming surfaces. I sighed.
Compared to the sleek elegance of the room, I looked like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Thirty years old. Too tall, too thin, too angry, too mean. My hair, once blue, was now faded out to the color of straw and hung limp around my face. My features were etched out in a constellation of silver pinpoints from a dozen piercings through my nose, lips, and eyebrows. Beneath the intricate web of my tattoos, my skin was sallow and swollen from too much alcohol and too many late nights. It was a good look for the front man of a metalcore band but a bad look for a law office.
The only part of me that looked like it belonged in this lustrous world was the antique silver pocket watch I was dangling in front of my face, trying to hypnotize myself into agreeability. It was an heirloom, naturally, dating back to the Columbian Exposition in the actual Gilded Age. Otherwise, I couldn’t have contrived to make myself look any more out of place if I’d tried.
New year, same old me.
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