When I was little, I used to read and write. Not in the sense of “I could read and I could write”, but more along the lines of “I did read books on a regular basis and wrote original stories, too”. I remember reading serial detective novels all the time, and trying to tackle The Collected Works of Sherlock Holmes when I was eight (but found it was too complicated). I remember getting lots of free pizza through the Book-It! program. I remember actually thumbing though the dictionary and thesaurus during breaks in second grade. I remember being able to type quickly without looking at the keyboard by the middle of third grade, and typing rather complicated multi-page stories by the time I was ten years old on Word Perfect in DOS 3.1. I remember the first time I got a return of zero mistakes on a spell check. I remember researching Greek and Roman mythology in dusty old encyclopedias with tannish-brown stains all over them. I even managed to get a poem into a minor publication for young authors by fourth grade, and the town newspaper also printed it.

But, somewhere along the line, I decided video games, anime, music, comic books, and movies were better ways to spend my time. I became convinced that books were plagued with long-winded explanations that never seemed to get to the point.
Maybe it was hormonal.

None-the-less, the philosophy lead me into the seldom rewarding world of art. I happened to be pretty good at it. All four walls in my bedroom were covered with my artwork from floor-to-ceiling. But I was apparently only good enough to get one honorable mention in one art exhibit (outside of school) during the twelve or so years I dedicated to it. Competing against abstract art was indeed tough: I remember bringing my portfolio to the Art Institute of Chicago and getting sneered at by recruiters for featuring pop art instead of abstract. And then … singing. I was really good at that, too. It was very rewarding to sing with other truly great singers, and I find myself missing it all the time. Ultimately, I got to perform in front of a crowd of hundreds, with the spotlight on me. Singing and being a teenager automatically lead me to playing guitar and writing songs. I even collaborated with other composers on-line, and was featured on a few websites. And I created websites. And fixed and built computers. And coded. And countless other hobbies, too, usually with great success. Before I knew it, I had become a Jack-of-all-trades. But there is something inherently flawed about Jacks: You only get one life, and if you don’t choose a single ‘something’ to focus on and stick with it, your energies become too dispersed and you are forever doomed to mediocrity (much like what happens when someone keeps changing their college major which, of course, I am also guilty of).

But I led myself further astray. I got into EverQuest, and I got into Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering of all things – just to name a few examples of hobbies that ate away all of my time and money leaving me with very little to show for it. Thankfully, those addictions are out of my system. Not that they had no worth – far from it. They offered me escapism when I needed it the most. In fact, those hobbies were instrumental in giving my imagination a much-needed jump-start. The creative and storytelling nature they portrayed began to rekindle my interest in writing and got me very interested in high fantasy.

The character ‘Sara’ from Sam Keith’s The Maxx (comic) spoke directly to my soul when she said, “That’s because I want to be a writer. And writers gotta have experiences, like underpasses.” It was a shock to my system to realize I had never experienced ‘underpasses’. So I took those years to experience life. To be on top. To feed with the bottom-feeders. To get dumped. To get married. To have no home. To enjoy pain. To do something good for a complete stranger. To not care about what other people think. To basque in the adrenaline rush that comes with fear. To experience wildly different cultures. To get high. To pick wild berries while the morning dew is still in the air. To take a moment and feel the warmth of the sun shining on my face at the end of a long, hard journey.

All of the decisions I’d made over the past twenty-eight years have lead me on the most peculiar roller-coaster ride through rich emotions, desperate situations, and even to the other side of the world. They have shown me how to cherish all of the bad moments with the good. And it reminded me that life is full of purpose and meaning. That living means something. Now, I am left with a passion for writing and more experiences to fuel it than I could have ever hoped for.

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