No, it started with winning the bonus vocab word "gruesome" in third grade, which I'm still so proud of in adulthood that it's awkward. I drew a medieval castle for a school assignment that year. It had vines very precisely coiled and colored, and windows with faces, and I remember a girl standing in the mote with hair of the brightest yellow colored pencil I could find. There was a lot of activity in those castle windows, people and places and things, nouns, loaves of bread levitating in mid-air.
I procrastinated for two years. My poem "Dreamboat of Constellations," a highfalutin work, was published to an anthology in fifth grade; the same year that rather than actually reading a book for the weekly book report, I composed elaborate reports from my imagination and babbled about them to the class, my voice hyper and fast and warbling with my lie. I did it every single week for the exhilaration, not of laziness; I poured a lot of energy into making those books sound fully realized; beginning, middle, and end, protag- and antagonist. The only fake title I remember is "The Red Bookmark."
I didn't want to read when they told me to read; I wanted to create. The teacher must have investigated those books. I think he is a fucking charming individual for letting me continue without ever saying a word. It is because of this betrayal that I am the only young adult who has not read A Wrinkle in Time.
I didn't want to read when they told me to read; I wanted to create. The teacher must have investigated those books. I think he is a fucking charming individual for letting me continue without ever saying a word. It is because of this betrayal that I am the only young adult who has not read A Wrinkle in Time.
I procrastinated for two more years, reading only Stephen King and becoming bored with it.
I read The Lord of the Rings in seventh grade and made lots of awesome LotR fan shirts. I saw The Fellowship of the Ring so many times in theatres. Orlando Bloom became my effeminate fantasy. "I HEART Legolas" in Sharpie. I spelled it out like that, I HEART him. But in seventh grade I hearted everyone. I met a boy in an AOL chatroom; "I HEART JOHN" on a post-it on my chest, which I wore all over school.
I started writing my first book in eighth grade, a fantasy novel that I gagged over all summer under a tree of my former elementary school. There was a female warrior with purple dreadlocks, a teal-skinned alien that spoke an exotic language (hsilgnE sdrawkcab), and a lot of 'juniper melons' in the a;sdghkladgs trees. It was a far cry from my Dreamboat days.
My second attempt to write my first book, I was nineteen. An urban fantasy of which I had a couple hundreds pages completed, and a flourishing outline. There was an alcoholic vixen with purple dreadlocks, a hero with a cheetah's face, and a monstrous rabid pumpkin that pulls the vixen underground with its vines. The cheetah, whose name I forget, saves the hungover broad from being eaten. He does it with bow and arrow.
I deleted that project about a year ago. I didn't save a trace.
Then I got a job working with used books. I had by this point exhausted the libraries of Tolkien and Palahniuk and found the classics for the first time. I was introduced to the beats (belatedly, I say, as Dharma Bums would have serviced me greatly in high school). I read Updike and Vonnegut and Joyce and I can't imagine having never read any of it! I realized I was missing out on true inspiration. I didn't go to college; I won't learn anything if I don't educate myself through other people's masterpieces. If I had never broadened my library, I don't know... "Catcher in the Rye is really good," I'd have as a stock response to a real bookworm. "One Hundred Years of Solitude, eh? Never heard of..."
I considered writing under an androgynous pen name so that nobody would know I am a woman - that awful stigma, I thought, of a creative woman! I could tell that wouldn't work as soon as I started brainstorming my alias. More a-sexual than androgynous. Sam Howell, Howl Junior...
My sole purpose in life may be to write a book and get hit by a car, whatever it is how short how long, I know it's writing. I should stand by my writing and let it take my name.
If I was missing anything throughout high school, where I fooled around and didn't apply to college, partying my face off instead of studying my chosen path in fiction writing: I missed that vital influence of a female writer. There is something about it, a woman who aspires to write looking up to a woman writing. My greatest influences are mostly men, and I love those men to death; but then you read Sylvia Plath, and suddenly you are cranking out 8,188-word stories in first-person narrative, a style with which you have always struggled, and they're stories that make you laugh out loud because you're so happy with them.
Anyway I'm not writing fantasy fiction per se.
