I admit it – usually, when I’m looking for the next WEbooker of the WEek, I go straight to Top Writers and check out the most prolific writers on the site. But this WEek’s WEbooker isn’t anywhere to be found on Top Writers. He’s not a Top Reviewer, either. So who is he, and why does he deserve the coveted honors – and spiffy new WEbook T-shirt – that go along with being named WEbooker of the WEek?
His name is revel_arroway, and he may not be a Top Writer or a Top Reviewer, but he’s been making quite a splash on the Forums these days. One provocative post has been hovering at the top of the General Chat forum for a week. If you want to find out what’s so provocative about it, you’ll have to read it for yourself.
WEbook is a community of writers, readers, and thinkers, and conversation is a big part of building a good community. So this week, I’m creating a brand new category just for revel_arroway: Top Conversationalist. Thanks for getting everyone talking, mr._arroway!
Revel_arroway is a recovering theatre major who left New York City to teach English as a Second Language in Spain. He’s been living there for 27 years, and he has no intention of ever returning to the States. You can find out more about his life abroad in WEbook’s Ex-Pat Journal. He became a writer when A Tale of Two Cities showed up on the required reading list of his freshman language arts class. Says revel_arroway, “I hadn’t finished reading it before I was trying to write my own epic novel.” I don’t know how that effort turned out, but he wrote what he considers his real first novel during his first months of living alone in Spain. One of his WEbook submissions, “She was by far,” is an excerpt from that book.
Since revel_arroway is so provocative, I decided to ask him a few provocative questions of my own.
Q: When was the last time you had a nightmare?
A: When I was a child I had a lot of nightmares, most of them involving flying, some with deaths of people close to me, few with monsters and the like. My mother suggested that in the flying dreams I should try to decide where I would like to fly, gain control over those dreams and enjoy the ride. For the rest of the dreams, she told me that, upon waking, I should try singing a song that I liked to calm my fears. That song was “Frosty the Snowman”, though I quickly had a nightmare about Frosty soon afterward. Anyway, the main thing my mother was trying to get across to me was that dreams are experience and one can be carried away or one can control, the decision is in one’s own hands. So, haven’t had a real nightmare for years, scary dreams perhaps, but I’ve always liked slash and gash literature!
Q: If you could live in the mountains, by the ocean, or in a city – but not
more than one of those places – which would you choose?
A: If those are the only three choices, I would say the mountains;
however, I looked at a few houses in the mountains when trying to buy a home
about four years ago and decided that driving on those narrow, winding roads
every day to get to work would be a nightmare in the winter time, and so chose
the open plains that stretch out from the foothills that are just an hour and a
half away from my new house. Maybe because I spent the best years of my life in
such an environment just east of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Maybe because
I don’t know how to swim and don’t like salty humidity destroying the under
works of my car. I do know that I like walking in the mountains, so much more
to see than walking on the beach. And I’ve had enough of cities after eight
years in New York, four in Barcelona, and another handful in other cities.
Q: What is the worst vacation you’ve ever been on?
Well, I didn’t go anywhere, but it was Christmas “vacation” when I was a sophomore in high school. My stepfather had made a lot of money that year and there were a lot of gifts for the kids and everything was going alright until my mother discovered that someone had chomped down on an entire Tupperware of bourbon balls that she had prepared months before and had left to ferment in a kitchen cupboard. Bourbon balls are disgusting chocolate balls with nuts and a lot of sugar and bourbon that my mother always made for Christmas. My stepfather went a bit mad, made a pretty horrible scene, the holiday was ruined, there were shouts and tears, the turkey dried out in the oven, the dinner was cancelled, finally my siblings were accused of the crime (though I am sure that my stepfather contributed to the disappearance of those disgusting things). I was scot free as it was well known that I did not like bourbon balls at all.
(Revel_arroway promises to write about that last one on WEbook soon, so keep your eyes open.)
-- Melissa
