My Writing Journey Thus far

Why I chose Writing

Or, how writing chose me.

I have always had stories in me and have been searching for an outlet my entire life. I remember my earliest attempt at story telling. I was in elementary school and I was bored.  I had a piece of paper in front of me and a pencil in hand. So I did the next logical thing and put pencil to paper and began to entertaining myself. I drew a stick figure and decided he was an army man. I added a triangle gun in his out stretched hand. The first problem became immediately evident, he had no enemy. So I added another guy facing him with a similar model weapon. I drew lines to indicate weapons fire and then I had to erase them and draw them on the ground dead. Then came problem number two, I had no more people. To compensate I drew more and the armies grew. Before I knew it class was over and I had a sheet of paper covered in dead and living soldiers. There were helicopters in the sky and tanks and cars on the ground. I decided a that moment drawing was how I was going to tell my stories.

By junior High I was all about comic books. I didn’t read actual books but comics were OK. In retrospect I wish I had been reading but nothing I can do about my prologue now. What I did do was draw characters from the comic books. I was very good at copying what I saw without tracing. I event went so far as to try creating my own characters. For the most part they were all lame and very two dimensional. I didn’t know that at the time of course but I tried and didn’t give up. While drawing comics was fun it still didn’t satisfy me. I felt there was something missing but I was not sure of what that was.

It seemed so obvious when that epiphany moment hit me. What the comics were missing was movement. I don’t mean that I failed to draw dynamic figures that seemed to be moving. I was watching a cartoon, as I have done since I was old enough to turn on a T.V., and I realized that is exactly how I should be telling stories. I took my sweet time to start working towards this goal. Many years later after I was an active duty Marine I started taking classes at the Art Institute in Schaumburg, Il. I took classes on and off, due to my deployment schedule and Operation Iraqi Freedom, for almost four years. I was working to earn a BA in Animation and Multi Media. I didn’t make it. I left the school with two years worth of credits and no degree. It became too expensive for me to continue.

Many years later, I had become a voracious reader. The stories I read played out in my mind like a movie in a 3D environment. It was and still is a wonderful experience. I also began listening to satellite radio, talk radio to be specific. Which lead to me listening to NPR and finally podcast. I started with a search on itunes for geek and ended up listening to The Geek’s Guide to The Galaxy. I was content for a while with that one. They inspired me to want to listen to more literature based podcasts. Back to itunes search where I found Michell Plested‘s podcast Get Published. Michell had Paul Elard Cooley on his show for an interview. I enjoyed it and decided to look up Paul on the internet. Then I discovered Shadow Publications and Paul’s podcasted fiction. Soon after Paul joined the Dead Robots Society podcast and I followed. They inspired me to try my hand at writing.  Then I did NANOWRIMO after experimenting with a few short stories. I won NANO and now here we are on my website where I will be blogging about writing and other stuff.