Not sure what to look at?

         I’m going to attempt to tell you a bit about me as a writer as well as the items in my port, at the same time. This’ll be, er, interesting…

         Similar to many writers you’ll meet, my love of books began at an early age. I finished reading my first chapter book, a youth adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, when I was in grade one. Other than that, I can’t recall much about my early reading life. I remember the school library being a thrilling discovery, where I could reach beyond my mother’s collection of classics like Peter Pan and A Little Princess to Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry. People could write entire books about horses? thought I. Those were the days.

         I wrote my first “chapter book” in grade two or three, entitled The Flying Unicorn. It was about a unicorn who had the misfortune of being born with wings as well as a horn, and was a total of about ten scribbler pages long, front and back--extensively illustrated. This interest evolved as I was given an electric typewriter, and throughout elementary and into junior high I wrote more novels revolving around the families of horse figurines I accumulated. All the horses had the usual horsey goals to a nine-year-old mind; find mares, win trophies, become wild and free.

         I doubt it was by accident that my tastes turned to romance. I was getting older, and books with horses on the front seemed innocently enough to guide me into the adventures of headstrong young women in westerns and civil wars. Now armed with a computer, duotang after duotang held the (illustrated) quests for love of princesses, pirates, and rebellious teenagers alike. If you’re already asking yourself when I’m going to get around to mentioning what can be found in my portfolio, this is it. One of these quests was written as a series of short(ish) stories set in the Old West, and I heavily rewrote ""Just a Girl"" , the 8th installment, for a contest.

         I did intend for others to read them, my timid nature notwithstanding. I gave one to my mother to leave in the staff room at her travel agency, and received feedback from her coworkers that I look back on as quite polite and encouraging to my fourteen-year-old ego. Standard accolades like “Of course you could publish it!” were easily believable, but I always suspected they were just being kind. After that, I gave my bursting duotangs only to school friends. In spite of my embarrassed pleas, one such friend gave my pirate story to our ninth grade English teacher. She, too, gave me nothing but positive feedback, and whenever I visit the school, she asks me how the writing’s coming. I always wonder if she cringes as much as I do thinking back to the precocious little high seas romance, and hopes I’ve come to my senses.

         Perhaps the obvious ego cushioning helped me resolve to become better. But even though I became more serious about writing in high school, I grew less serious about reading. Other than the required novels and plays for my English courses, I just didn’t feel I had it in me to try to find something new to read that I would like. Movies became nearly my sole intake of storytelling, other than a few favorite books I read and reread, like the unadulterated version of The Phantom of the Opera and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books.

         A friend contacted me with a written blurb based on a dream he’d had. He had created a character who was part of a new breed of human with heightened brain power, and had been used in a hypothetical World War Three as a human weapon, and I was intrigued by the emotional aspect of it. Probably because of my enthusiasm, he asked me to rewrite it from the female character’s point of view, and as ideas flew, an "Untitled Cowritten Sci-Fi - WIP"  was born. I’d never written anything resembling science fiction before, but seen through the eyes of the female character, it became a surmountable task. His life has taken him in another direction, however, and now I get a new installment from him once a year if I’m lucky. So this one may always be unfinished until he gives me permission to complete it myself.

         It was about this time that I started writing my first scenes for "Girl from Earth" . This was a new way of writing for me; I was accustomed to typing from start to finish, and if I couldn’t get beyond chapter four, well, there was no point in writing the ending. Putting down scenes as they came to mind kept me writing regularly, kept my interest, and was the most fun I’d had writing anything in my life. I didn’t know much about the story to begin with. All I knew was that I wanted to put a loudmouth girl who resembled many of my school friends into a fantasy setting (with a gorgeous long-haired knight ) and happened to choose space travel instead of dimensional travel. This book has become a 300,000 word monster with a sequel nearing that size. It was the only writing project I worked on constantly throughout high school and into college. "One Thousand Tales"  holds excerpts to either of these.

         The happy-go-lucky main character Zoe was no outlet for my teenage angst. I expended that through rants rather than poems. My enjoyment of ranting also began in high school. Who doesn’t know how intense frustrations can be at that point in life? Now I keep a separate blog for my rants, but "The Saran Wrap Rant"  was my first and holds a special place in my heart. When I had to do a monologue for Drama class, I used this, and it was such a hit that the teacher asked me to perform it for the junior high students when they came for orientation. I attest not to my acting talents, which weren’t many, but this was one fun script to scream. The teacher asked to keep a copy for his own uses.

         As we come out of high school, we see I’ve spent most of my energy on "Girl from Earth" . Composing something shorter than 10,000 words has become a difficult thing to do with my long-winded, meandering tendencies. I can blame some of that on the few reread books I hoarded through high school, but I must also attribute some of that to the trips my mother and I took with her various deals and winnings through her work as a travel consultant. From Hawaii to Europe to Indonesia, I greedily gobbled up scenery and reveled in the little anecdotes I gained. I’ve always liked to smell the roses and get to know my surroundings, rather than speed to a destination. Short stories frustrate me, but now and then I like a challenge. You can see some more attempts here: "Schezar's Shorts" 

         You may have noticed I keep mentioning how the things I wrote were illustrated. For me, that’s always gone hand in hand, so it seemed natural to continue from graduation into art college. I did general studies for a while, which was great for getting a taste of the art world. In my first year I was confronted with every art student’s initiation, their worst fear, and an all-around cool experience: the "Nude" . Of course, by now the magic of nudity has worn itself thin, and I groan every time I hear there is yet another model coming to class. Another requirement of every art student is art history classes, where my love of the past has been given far more fuel than I will ever know what to do with. "The Ornament"  was written for a contest, and based on an Impressionist painting of a woman at an opera I’d seen in class.

         My art niche has turned out not to be fine art at all, but design- specifically illustration, which I fought tooth and nail for some time. But as soon as I accepted the inevitable, a new world was opened to me. One of the required classes for the design major is a narrative class which familiarizes the student with fiction and storytelling. Out of that class has come a couple of essays on storytelling, "Making it Known: Defining Narrative"  and "Epic and Romance" , and a short story exercise, "The Delay" 

         I have been an only child all my life, but after my first year of college, my mother remarried, and as I was already in debt with the government and in no state to move out, I came to live with a stepfamily including two other teenage girls. The drama involved in holding a family together began to fascinate me, especially after a few unexpected setbacks, and I began to work this new world of sisterhood into my writing. "Atlas of Aeslea"  is one of my first conscious experiments with that element, and probably won’t be the last.

         Now, nearly finished college (or so I am trying to convince myself), I am still working on a complete overhaul of "Girl from Earth" , preparing it either for publication or adaptation into graphic novel form. Although I make it a goal to pin down at least one new story idea each year and wrestle it into the shape of a story, I have a very bad habit of not wanting to start anything new. That made "Atlas of Aeslea"  seem like such an astonishing one-off, and has frightened me against delving into anything that might be so all-consuming again. Still, I enter anything to do with my writing in my blog, "A Writer's Resolutions" . I have to say it’s not nearly as witty as a writer’s blog ought to be, but it seems to be helping me to remain aware of my goals.

         In my first draft of this item, I went all the through my formative years without really delving into my reason for writing. By this edit, I know it’s a deliberate oversight. I don’t know why I write. I am only painfully aware that I can’t not write. From the very beginning, I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to entertain. To capture imaginations the way mine was captured. And along the way, I discovered that the process amused me as well. It was as if I was reading a book, but things were going the way I wanted them to go. Pleasing someone else is an added bonus.

         Enjoy your time here, and I’ve provided a recommended reading list if by this time you’d rather be elsewhere: "Looking for great novels to read?"