My Writing Journey

I’ve been writing ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper. Well for me that would have been 5th grade. Our teacher wanted us to write a story and then bind it into a book form. So I thought for a while to try to figure out just what I was interested in writing. At that time I didn’t know anything about that saying, write what you know, but I still came to the same decision and decided to write about animals.

Growing up we had something of a farm of animals in a residential house. We had hamsters, guinea pigs (not a fan), gerbils, dogs, cats, fish, ferrets, rabbits…the list goes on. My sister and I were kind to these animals but for some weird reason I went Stephen King on this story. The animals all talked to each other naturally (my sister and I played animals instead of Barbies as kids) and they were ruled over by an evil caretaker who abused them. Finally tired of the abuse the animals revolted and killed the caretaker.

With the story written I had to create the binding for the book. I hand wrote the pages (no computers back then) and illustrated with color crayons including a scene full of blood coming out of a pitchfork embedded in his gut when the animals killed him. And believe it or not I turned it in. And believe it or not CPS wasn’t called to see if there was any wrong doing in my house when the teacher saw it and I didn’t have to go through any therapy for what I had done. I’m glad none of that happened because even though it was gruesome I was really proud of the fact that I could weave a tale. I think the trauma of therapy or being removed from my family would have snuffed that out. Even if CPS did come they wouldn’t take me from my home. There was no reason to. But you still have to wonder where that came from and to this day I still have no clue.

But the important thing is I kept writing and over the years I wrote short stories and poems but never thought I had it in me to write a full book. I mean that’s huge. I did stop writing for several years after my twelfth grade English class. My teacher was the best teacher I’ve ever had and because of it, this hit me the hardest. Everyone up to this point had told me how remarkable my writing was but in this class only her favorite and best written stories were read aloud and mine was never one of them. I had left the bloody stories behind after 5th grade so I knew it wasn’t that. So I left very discouraged and hung my writing on a hook for a while.

I don’t know what kick started me but thankfully something did. Now I’ve written a science fiction book titled PLAGUE OF THE CHUPACABRA, just finished a fantasy novel titled RISE OF THE WINGED ASSASSIN and I’m currently working on a YA Paranormal novel titled SHADOW LIFE. I’m currently looking for representation for the fantasy novel and hopefully one day after I’m established the science fiction one. As you can see it’s about chupacabras and right now the hype is over and I think that agents would take one look at the title and think its cheese when in fact it’s based on scientific research I did and then wrapped my theory around a story. Maybe one day this one will make it to the book stores but I think my best shot right now is the fantasy.

So my point in starting a blog is to document my progress on my adventure’s to hopefully getting published and maybe it might help someone else. There will be subcategories for each one excluding the science fiction one. It needs some serious editing before I can really focus on it.

If you stumble across this blog hopefully you find it useful if not encouraging. If you can spin a story then you can do it too.