Kill, Cry, or Die: A collection of Poems, Epigrams, Aphorisms, Philosophy, Thoughts and Humor (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781956161557)

During my time in the army, a lot of my intellectual pursuits had been on hold. Within the first year of getting out, I began to use the Internet for research; one of my favorite things to look up was famous quotations. One day, after reading some, I wondered to myself if I could write things to a similar effect. In my room, there was laying an unused journal my mother had brought for me, so I sat down with the journal and made my first attempt at writing an epigram. I came up with about four or five, to which I know at least one of them has made the final copy of the book. Being satisfied, I decided that I would take up the habit of writing things down in a journal. Within a month or so, I became inspired to write the poem "Kill, Cry, or Diet' Up until that point, I had been unaware of my talent for poetry, and poems would then on make appearances in my journals. Over the years, I did not write with great consistency as that months would go by, and nothing would be written to the contrast of other times would I would write something virtually every day for a month. Much of the journal's progress was affected by my bipolar disorder, as during depressions, my writing had gone all but forgotten for whole years, and then when in mania, I would write frequently but would later deem a lot of the material unusable. During my last period of mania, I began to consolidate my work into one journal and, after doing so, had thrown much of my work into fires, as well as using a black marker to edit out traces of things written. I regretfully lost a lot of material in this process, but I feel that I managed to save most of what was good from it. From June of 2013 to September of 2014, I had not touched my journals to write or read from them; they sat forgotten in a box, thinking I would never write again. One day I pulled them out and decided to read them over; I found that I had forgotten most of what I had written and, with a sober mind, began to type up the material that I felt was worth keeping and sharing with others. After the task was complete, I feared that I had excluded so much material that I would not have enough for a book, but this problem was quickly resolved that I had become inspired to write again and began to come up with new material, and I felt I had improved some as that all the new stuff was usable. Overall the completion of this book took about eight years from when I first put pen to paper. I hope you enjoy this book, as I feel that I have only put my best foot forward and been far more critical of my work than anyone else has been.