Writing On The Spectrum

And the evolution of Writing After Dark

I was diagnosed with autism in 2022 and started to blog on it in 2023. I was going to write about the intersection of autism and writing. Instead, I spent the next few months sharing poetry and odd bits of prose.

I found it surprisingly hard to write about my own lived experience, even though I knew no one would read my posts. But sharing snippets of my work was easy. I liked my short pieces. It was the longer stuff that was a problem.

I had been writing for most of my life, but none of my novels ever came out "right." I had dozens of unfinished manuscripts and those I had finished failed to meet genre expectations over and over again.

Fast forward to April 2024. I had just finished my first full-length vampire story with the help of an online critique group. When that story failed, I realized that I'd hit a wall with my writing.

In an attempt to understand why structuring long-form fiction was hard for me, I began to learn about autism and how it was affecting my ability to construct a narrative. And then I went on to think about the how autism and decades of masking had affected me.

I decided it was time to stop pretending that this wasn't a big deal and share about it openly. For me removing the mask meant trying to be who I really was all across the board. Hence, this post.

UPDATE: I started writing and podcasting about autism not long after I wrote this post and just kept going. Some of my posts are about autism. Some aren’t. Current content focuses on autism, writing and the occasional special interest.

I also share excerpts of my fiction from time to time and hope to share more.

It’s a bit of mashup I know. Content is organized by section (autism, dreams, fiction, nonfiction and recent posts) on the home page. You can find the podcast on menu bar and in the autism section.

For a deeper dive into the relationship between autism and writing, please see:

Autism and the Narrative Process