Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.
—Mick Jagger, “Sympathy for the Devil”
It's Tom, actually. Tom Mock. No great mystery there. After all, my name is printed at the bottom of this post and elsewhere on the page, but I'll share that transparency with Sympathy, which is also less of a riddle than the opening lines suggest. My jazz friends call me Thelonious some of the time. If you have any appreciation for jazz, you'll probably get that. If not, that's fine. Most jazz jokes are way inside anyway, and not funny, and also not jokes. Hmm... Anyway.
I write, I read, and I absolutely love stories. That's mostly what I plan to talk about here.
I'm currently working on the sixth draft of my first novel. This will be the third and final re-write. After a few rounds of revision, it's on to the next one. I started the project my senior year in High School, thanks to the support of a dedicated, and deeply subversive teacher who let me write in his office instead of go to a “real” class, and I've been working on it off and on all through college. I'm happy with how it is finally coming together.
I live in North Carolina, and I got my MA in English from NC State University in 2012. I say “got” instead of “earned” because, even though I went to all the classes, wrote a decent thesis, and had good grades, I don't feel I got all I could have out of the experience. Not that I didn't learn a lot—and I mean a lot. No-no. You don't read Moby Dick in grad school and come out the other end of that voyage the same, or you can call me Ishmael!
