I’m Jon Oropeza. I write - code by day, fiction by night. This is the homepage for the fiction me. Probably you’re here for one of four reasons –

- You know me and want to know what I’m up to. This page is an excellent place to start, as is my flickr feed.

- You're looking for the coder me. I'm currently happily employed at LifePro, the world's greatest financial services marketing firm. Seriously. Check us out our pics.

- You’ve Googled some esoteric topic that I’ve blurted about. Since I’m an opinionated bastard, you’re probably miffed or pissed off at me right now. Sorry. I do that to people.

- You’re hopelessly lost, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

You might as well call this a blog, though it’s closer in theme to a research journal. I don’t do comments or trackbacks, not because I don’t want to hear from you but because I haven’t found a way to do that without becoming heavily invested in it. I’m not trying to create community here – there’s already enough fabulously talented people doing that on the web! What I am trying to do is to share with you the inner workings of my creative process. Why? Because I think it’s neat to see how other people work. Call it Open Source Writing – not writing about Open Source but writing with the source code laid bare at your feet.

My current project is A Story About San Diego Written While Backpacking Through Europe, known in some places as Project Surrealiste and in others by it’s super-secret name, Shit or Get Off The Shitter.

It’s a novel-length piece about my life. It’s both untrue and hypertrue, just like the story of your life.

As of January 2007 I am approximately 40% through my edit. And the site is up. Check it out!

I plan to have a complete 2nd draft done by summer and to have the novel out by labor day.

This is not the first novel-length piece that I’ve written. I spent five years writing my first novel, Fully Evolved, which came together finally as a coherent piece that I’m neither proud nor ashamed of. It was a necessary process, an enormous learning experience. You can read it here if you’d like. I’m sorry, I don’t have any more hard copies.

In 2003 I began a novel-length project that I called Digital Candy. The story was what I call a layer-cake submergence. You start out at what you’d call a normal life and in bites you descend into the inner workings of life, which involves a heavy amount of paranoia and confusion. It was a very optimistic project – too optimistic, as it turned out. I had Pynchonian aspirations but I would have needed to be TP to pull it off and I’m not TP. In the spring of 2004, with 80,000 words written, I abandoned Digital Candy for something that I supposed would be more feasible given my current skill level – a novel about San Diego called And on the Sixth Day.

And on the Sixth Day was another layer-cake, this time though involving two protagonists whose lives would intertwine over their mutual discovery that everything man has ever dreamed about – alchemy, dragons, vampires – exists in a plane that’s accessible to us if we take the right drugs/medicine/potion. It was a neat project and I wrote about 100,000 words in two drafts on it and I may finish it someday.

On the last days of 2005 I caught a hop to Europe for 17 days of solo travel. During those seventeen days I lived and wrote voraciously. Everything I had thought about writing vanished as I began a story that was immediately recognizable as the True Truth that I carry around in my head. The problem with And on the Sixth Day and Digital Candy and Fully Evolved even was that they were fiction, and it was an effort to write them because I was constantly making things up. I resolved to write this new piece from the heart, never stopping to worry about constructs but trusting my own instincts for how to tell a story.

Stay tuned to see how it turns out.

In addition to Fully Evolved, I’ve also written quite a few short stories and poems, which I’ve published below. At some point I’d like to put together a collection of Northern California-inspired pieces – you’ll notice that many of the stories and most of the poems involve the Bay Area, where I spent the first 21 years of my life.