So now that the mandatory Welcome and About post is out of the way, I thought it would be good to begin my journey at the beginning. You often hear that advice from other writers, especially when you're first starting out, and always the difficulty lies in knowing just what the beginning truly is. In the story of Me, however, that's not too hard of a question to answer.
I was always reading as a child. Always imagining and drawing and building things out legos and driftwood when we went to the coast. When we would drive through the mountains I would look up at the sheer cliffs that bordered each side of the road and say to myself "What's up there?" I was full of imagination and yearned to be doing and adventuring.
That changed in middle school, however. It wasn't a particularly bad time for me while I was going through it like I hear it is for so many people. But now I realize how horrible of a time I really had, and recognize that I should have done something different than what I did. Suffice it to say I had a few bad teachers who, instead of lifting me up and encouraging me, rather sought to tear me down and squelch my ideas and dreams into the dust. Well, they succeeded.
A few years passed and my family moved to a new city. I got involved with theatre and, while I still had a yearning to be out and doing and adventuring, I no longer had an imagination to fuel those desires. So, come college, I decided I'd had enough of the mindless existence of trudging from one day to the next and that I wanted to go back to the time when I saw magic and wonder in everything. Some of that decline in imagination is just part of growing up, you might say. And I'd agree. For some, it is. But it wasn't what I wanted. To make a change I knew I had to do something. I had to give myself an imagination.
I know what you're thinking. "You what? How do you give yourself an imagination?"
I sat down and thought. Thought about all the things I missed about myself from before middle school, what it was about them that I missed, and what sort of things my imagination actually came up with and how they made me feel. Yeah, I got in touch with my feelings.
From all that I started to get ideas for fantasy and sci-fi stories. For spaceships flying between the stars, dragons and knights on epic quests, airships and primitive submarines, gods and angels and demons, magic and missiles and laser beams. Basically, viola! Hello never ending imagination!