From Un-Me To Real Me: Discovering My Passion For Writing

Part 1

For as long as I can remember I've had two passions: art and writing.

Ever since I could hold a crayon I've been drawing. Everything my eyes could see I drew. As a teenager I didn't go out and party on Friday nights because I didn't care about that stuff. I cared about art. My eyes couldn't stop looking around and my fingers couldn't stop interpreting what my eyes were seeing.

An old pencil sketch.

My interest in the visual medium turned to movies. I was obsessed with the old Disney animated classics like Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. I wanted to tell stories through the art of filmmaking.

But there was one little problem. Hollywood.

Even as a teenager I was able to recognize that Hollywood was a dump. The masquerading and narcissism and lying and whoring and nonsense required to make it in Hollywood was sickening to me. I admire anyone who can endure that kind of treatment and posturing, but it's not what I was cut out for.

As a kid from Nowhereville, Vermont I would have to work doubly hard just to get to Hollywood, not to mention figuring out how to get involved in movies.

This was before the days of the internet where everything you ever wanted to know was at your fingertips. I had no idea that there were schools for animation and movie making.

This is an old fight scene I filmed with a friend of mine as part of a movie we made when we were teenagers. We were our own gang, and this was our drug!
But I had all these stories that I could see in my head. They'd play through my brain like movies.

And so I started writing them down.

I wrote my first novel at the age of 14. It was called Unknown, and it was about two teenagers who spend a horrifying night barred up in a tree house as an unknown creature of some sort tries to get in and rip them to shreds. I wrote it on an old DOS computer before the days of Microsoft Worthless and Spellmesser. I think the novel was about 65,000 words. Not bad for a first time effort.

And then the computer I was working on crashed and all of my data was lost.

I moped about it for a while, but I started writing again, this time in what would become my genre of choice, medieval fantasy. I was inspired by—as most all fantasy writers are—The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and newer works like R.A. Salvatore's The Dark Elf series.

My second novel was 95,000 words, and I submitted it for publication when I was 16. After about four rejection letters I got an email from a small company called EricaHouse. They specialized in first time authors. They liked that I was so young and showed so much potential. They liked my book and wanted to publish it.

What should've been a great opportunity turned into a lesson for the naive.

To be continued...