“Salazar”, “Salazar Cevallos”, aka “Sebastian Gael Cevallos”: Writer

Hello, welcome, and it’s a pleasure to meet you!

My name is “Sebastian Gael Cevallos”. I’m also “happy to be here” and “looking forward” to a long, fruitful, gap year experience. Because there’s enough substance beyond the horizons, beyond this text box and white space and webpage, to last us, well, well beyond seven months! I’m a “writer”. I’m also “Sebastian Gael Cevallos”. But I hope that by the end of our journey together you’ll come to know me by a different name: “Salazar”, “Salazar Cevallos”.

How much work does it take to outpace a name? To be known as something other than what you were before. To have undergone such a transformation that the old one sheds like salamander skin and a new, shinier name takes it’s place. That is my gap year objective. To incubate, birth, and grow a name. A pen-name. “Salazar Cevallos”. I’m a writer, did I mention that already?

Writers have style, a personalized technique or recognizable quirks that set their work apart from all others. Even if you steal their ideas, copy the loglines, write down their character sheets, you can never quite recreate another’s piece because of this style unique as fingerprints. People have style. People, also, have fingerprints. So do writers. Therefore people are writers, writers are people. And it’s true, we all are writers! We express ourselves through words, through meanings distilled into a few brushstrokes of your pen. Or some tippity-tapping on a keyboard. Or some vocalized groans, moans, and various pronunciations from the throat. Or your mind, just how it runs in general. What I mean to write is, we all are in the same boat. I’m pursuing a career in what you do everday. I want to be like you. I want to be able to write your perspectives, your imaginations, scrapbook them into poems and short stories and novels. But I already am a writer. And I always will be. So my objective in this year is just to be a better writer than I was the day before. To nail this writing schedule with a hammer hard enough that it rewrites my brain chemicals, my DNA.

I want to be the best writer I can be. I want to be so good of a writer that more people know me as “Salazar Cevallos”, a pen name, than “Sebastian”. And I can only achieve that through publication. And I can only achieve publication through the honing of my practice. And I can only hone my practice by the inauguration of a disciplined writing routine. This, friends and newcomers, is the fundamental roadmap of my gap year. To achieve these things and more I will need to push myself farther than ever before. I will need to withstand any and all. So with physical travel and work can I introduce the stressors strong enough to truly toughen up my convictions. I am ready to take on the fire and flames and I am ready to take it on with you, dear friend, newcomer, you who will follow me through this gap year beginning to the gap year end. I can’t wait to pull through with you in hand, we’ll do it together.

But enough of this, what are we waiting for, we have writing to do, people to meet, places to see! There’s life beyond the horizons, this text block and white space and webpage, there’s a whole world out there, don’t you see? So let’s get started, you can call me “Salazar Cevallos”! And did you know I’m a “writer”?