I recently completed a six year stint in the Army as a signals intelligence analyst, specializing in the Korean language. Needless to say, I've never been to Korea, but I had the pleasure of spending 12 wonderful months in Baghdad. Seriously. It was the best year I had in the Army, it's the only time I had a job worth doing. The rest of my time was spent cleaning toilets and repeatedly organizing the useless contents of the same ten shipping containers. It got a little repetitive.

While in Iraq, I got a start on my first novel. I'm currently slogging through a second draft version (without ever having completed the first draft) and preparing it for publication. I'm not sure I'll do anything with that material here on WEbook aside from posting a few samples now and again. Here's the description of my book, as it appears on the prototype book jacket...

[[ In his debut novel, Ryan Placchetti, explores the complex sentiments of being in the Iraq war through the eyes of a fictional chain-smoking schizophrenic named Adam Blue.

A Private in the United States Army, Adam Blue, confronts the horrors of war with wide eyes, turning to imaginary friends for comfort in the face of tragedy. Suffering from acute paranoia and delusions, Adam lives in a frightening and fantastic world where celestial bodies speak, and magical beasts roam free.

Imagined horrors combine with the true horror of war as Adam finds himself stalked by a cannibalistic colonel, hunted by sea-monsters lurking in the depths of the Tigris River, and harassed by demons that enter his brain while he sleeps.

Adam Blue and his companions, real and imaginary, search for meaning in circumstances they can’t begin to explain.

This novel was conceived and written while the author was deployed to Baghdad from 2005-2006. ]]

I worked for 15 months on an indie video-game mod project as the Creative Lead of the writing department. This was my introduction to crowd-sourced projects, and overall the experience taught me a lot of things about how to organize my writing while collaborating with others. Hopefully I can bring a little bit of that to WEbook, once I get interested in some projects.

This site came as a little bit of a kick in the teeth for me. I've been brainstorming lately about how I could apply the crowd-sourcing techniques I learned working on the video-game to the realm of literary publishing. I've been snaked, I'll survive... and I'll enjoy not having to actually build the community I envisioned. Chalk one up for my inner sloth.

I suppose I should talk about my writing style. Put very plainly, I have long surrealistic streak whether applied to fiction or non-fiction. Right now I specialize in fiction, but I've had a hand at poetry.

The opening paragraph of my obnoxiously long-titled first novel <i>A Lively New Home for Crafty Old Jackals: Private Adam Blue's Last Distilment from a Long and Inward Discourse</i>

[[ The universe flung itself to and fro, dramatically slinging its bits and pieces against each other. No one really cared enough to notice. The petty rustling of mankind had drawn the eyes of the cosmos to a splintered desert nation. The icy fingers of death were snapping a catchy tune, and humanity was stomping and clapping in time with every ounce of enthusiasm it could muster. ]]

Sorry all that was so long, there really wasn't anywhere else to put all that.