Welcome!

I guess I've decided to start a blog. Seems like the thing to do, yes? We'll aim for once a week and see how it goes from there!

So what does one do for a first blog post? How about a bit more about me and my passion for writing? That seems like a good idea!

I honestly do not remember the moment I decided to be a writer, but I do have memories as a pre-teen of walking around with a clipboard and surveying my family and neighbors about such things as protagonist names and book titles. I recall one option for the hero being "Rock Stone". By then I had been well-exposed to authors such as Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, so the name was not without it's obvious connotations.

Not much came from that excursion, or at least not much I recall, but the flickering flame of fiction had been lit, and it's yet to go out.

My next attempt at producing a story took place in my early college years. Again, the reason for this spurt of activity has been lost to the fog of ages, but I had a whole series of fantasy books planned out: timelines, several characters, how they would all weave together into a grand story of rising calamities until the end. The few chapters I did write, and the multitude of reference materials produced, still reside in the cloud, waiting for me to pluck them forth and give it a go again. Maybe one day.

I devoured books as a kid, mostly science-fiction and fantasy (I read my father's battered copy of The Hobbit very early on) all the way up until college, when for one reason or another things fell off. For a while, those "dark years", not much reading or writing happened, apart from that aforementioned fantasy epic. I prefer to think of those years as a fever dream from which I have only recently awoken.

I'm able to pinpoint the exact moment, in 2018, when I began writing again, a desire which hasn't stopped yet and never will. I was in the middle of a playthrough of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (the best one in the series, and the last I bothered with), and had gotten to the part when you help break Mary Read and Anne Bonny out of jail. On the off-chance someone out there doesn't want to be spoiled about an eight year old video game, I'll leave off the details, but suffice it to say I got caught up in the emotions of the moment. The following narrative continued the hard-hitting emotions, and something in my brain cracked.

I needed a way to process the complex feelings this game (along with some other real-life situations going on) were causing. A night or two after, I had one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had! Sadly, not related to pirates in any way, but still very evocative, and without a doubt influenced by the game.

Waking up in a frenzy of energy, I took as many notes as I could about the dream, and in the days after ended up developing it into what turned into the first full book I'd written. All the jumbled mixture of emotions, happy and sad, drawn out of me by the game and the dream, needed a place to go, and writing those words provided an important catharsis.

The book was, of course, completely terrible, and it will never see the light of day without major revisions, but it was the start and I'll never forget it!

Since then I've written six other full books (two of which are published), five novellas (self-published), and left a few unfinished projects along the way. Each time I start a new project, it's with the new knowledge gained from the last.

That is why I know I'll never stop writing. Each journey is new, different, full of potential, different themes, different characters; the combinations are endless.

So, if you're interested to see what I come up with, stick around! Plus, who knows what wacky things I'll get a bee in my bonnet about, spilling the entrails all over this blog. Excitement is sure to happen!