Origins Blogfest

Welcome to the Origins Blogfest! This is the fest where we all share the beginnings of how we became a writer. The idea comes from DL Hammons, who along with Katie, and Alex, are my co-hosts for the blogfest. For the list of all participants, just click on that first link.

So let's get to it.

I shared a bit about how I fell in love with reading on Friday at Project Mayhem. I think it's a natural progression to go from falling in love with books and reading to falling in love with writing. That's certainly how it worked for me. So after falling in love with Tolkien, and collecting everything I could that had anything to do with Middle Earth, it was easy for me to get hooked on Dungeons & Dragons.

My best friend in grade school was Irish Catholic, so he had seven older brothers, and one younger. They all played D&D together, so whenever I went over to their house, it was wizards and warriors and epic adventures. I think that's what first made me fall in love with writing. Not only was it making things up, and using your imagination, but there was such language! Gary Gygax may not have ever been a novelist, but he sure knew how to describe a monster, and he made up some very cool spells.

From there I progressed to reading all the fantasy I could get my hands on. A lot of it was tie-ins like Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, but I also enjoyed original stuff like Pern, and Shannara, and so on. I think I tried to write my first novel when I was about 12. In sixth grade. It was on Wordperfect, on a monochrome screen, and I only made it a few chapters in.

Then my reading matured, and I got into spy thrillers by the likes of Le Carre, Ludlum, and Forysth. I started writing short stories, and even won some kind of contest for a short story I wrote that I can't even remember. From there I got into poetry, and trying to write song lyrics. All through high school I loved to write, and wrote all kinds of different things.

Then things changed, and life got in the way, and I didn't write a thing for over a decade. It wasn't until a few years ago that I decided to write a novel, but that's probably a story for another time.