Like many children with a history of mental disorders and lack of close friendships I too love stories. Escapism is my bread an butter. Hence my long history with dissociative amnesia. Because nothing helps the screaming in your head stop like forgetting whose voice it is. All semi jokes aside, fiction has been a huge part of my life for a long time but not always books, that was a recent addiction. For me it was cartoons. Courage the Cowardly Dog, Avatar the Last Air Bender, Ben 10, Danny Phantom, the classics. Then around middle school I started to move toward anime and this funny little thing called acting. Yep I was a theatre kid, big shocker. At first I thought I wanted to be a leading man. Problem was I didn’t like my lines, being on stage, or the whole collaborative effort. So then with an ego full of hot air I decided I wanted to be a director for movies, an Auteur. That did work out once I realized how little time a movie actually played, the amount of skills you needed to be familiar with, the money it cost, and the amount of leadership that took. But with my famously hard head, I didn’t turn the idea away entirely. I thought I could write manuscripts for movies. The whole idea that a movie got made three times really stuck with me. But upon doing research for screen writing I heard that the best screenplays read like books. Hence my start.

I’d tried working on a few creative projects before but nothing as concrete as a book up till that point. Then my first big idea, a huge quest following a chosen one hero denying his fate in a huge globe trotting adventure where mages partnered with humans who could transform into weapons. Pretty much Hellboy meets The Odyssey meets soul eater. And I remind the reader that nothing is original under the sun. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Stranger things follow nearly identical story structures if you really want to nit pick. Bad artists are wholly original. Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. Or something to that effect. With this idea I originally called Wands, I moved forward for roughly four years plotting a lot of a ten part four act story and wrote out roughly six chapters of with many drafts of each. I know not great but then again some of the best authors worked on a single book for twenty years. So who knows. Upon which time I decided to as we writers say, chased bunnies. Basically I convinced myself the project had grown too big and I needed to work on something else for experience. Then something else. And something else again. A few times. A number of small projects later I essentially exhausted the rabbit and returned to my original project. I, like any good endurance predator, have chased the rabbit until it died of exhaustion and now am ready to hunt what can comparable be considered a bear. Nothing at all can go wrong. bears don’t kill people who enter their nests right? Or did I learn that from an anime?

As far as for the stories I enjoy, I have enjoy them for many colorful and specific reasons, not the least of which being the escapist nature of them. I always gravitated toward well written stories. The genres I enjoyed have varied somewhat but always stories that held magic of some sort. Whether that be literal magic like wizards or magic by another name like bending in Avatar the Last Airbender. I have always enjoyed anything with dark fantasy elements and the comedic cosmic horror series John Dies At The End is what got me into reading in the first place. It was only recently I learned of what progression fantasy is and just how much it fit my series. Thank you Barnes and Noble fantasy section and Will Wight! Now I will progress down my writing path, Endless Semiserious Absurd Flapping, until I reach ultimate enlightenment. If you’re interested in writing join my newsletter to get updates on my blog which will include writing advice!