We start where we always have, at the beginning.
It’s 1983, in Spokane, and I was a baby. Yes, I said it, a baby. I was an adorable baby with big blue eyes and dimples and an irrepressible grin. Or so I’m told. But let’s skip ahead a bit.
We’re in Southern California, in one of a dozen cities (we moved a lot). I was 6 or 7 and, like most writers, I read voraciously. One of my strongest memories was reading Fantastic Mr. Fox by nightlight, long past my bedtime. Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, one fat, one short, one lean. Of course, I read all Roald Dahl’s other books (I think Matilda might be my favorite) and more. Encyclopedia Brown, Boxcar Children, My Father’s Dragon, Chronicles of Narnia (which my dad read aloud to me and my siblings)…
In my first ever story, I imagined myself an orphan because all the best characters were orphans.
By the time we moved to Idaho, I was 9 and I’d started reading Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicle of Prydain. Then I got really interested in mythology. I read about Olympus and Osiris and Ragnarok and Robin Hood. I went through a King Arthur and Merlin phase. I read T.H. White and T.A. Barron and a translation of Le Morte d’Arthur (which wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as I thought it’d be). I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (though I prefer the Hobbit).
I read Grisham and Harlequin Romance (stolen from my mom’s secret stash) and got into comics and graphic novels, which are just a different type of mythology. But my true love was fantasy. The search for fantastic worlds was never-ending but, fortunately, so were the worlds themselves. If I were to list books and worlds I fell into, and fell in love with, this would be a hundred pages. Suffice it to say I dove deep and drank lakes, oceans of stories.
In Texas, I was introduced to yet another story source, Anime and Manga, with a whole new world of tropes and characters. To this day, I count Arakawa Hiromu and Eiichiro Oda as much of a foundational influence as Lloyd Alexander and Tad Williams and R.A. Salvatore.
The 2000s were more stories, just in different form, video games and movies and TV. Also failure, heartbreak, and depression as real life proved far more difficult to navigate than the stories would have me believe.
But it was books that brought me back. I started working at a library and started reading again. All my friends were still there, waiting for me. I made some changes. Took some risks, made some mistakes. Went to Hawaii for year. Went broke. Finished a degree (not the same one I’d started years ago). Discovered that psychology was not the field for me (though I retained my interest, which has carried into many aspects of my life).
And I started writing.
At first, I was killing time and maybe felt like I had something to prove. I set out to write the greatest epic that had ever been written. The most interesting characters. The most unique world. The most gripping plot. Everyone would read it and say, Oh how marvelous! Oh how deep and clever! Oh how nuanced and sublime!
One person read it.
And not because I didn’t send it out to anyone I could. I sent it to everyone who even seemed halfway interested. But one person read it all the way through. One person believed in me, from the beginning. As she always had, from the beginning. My mom.
It was terrible. I spent ten years working on it and it’s still terrible. But she believed in me. So I kept writing. I took a class that gave me some much needed perspective. And somewhere along the way, my reason for doing it changed, as did my approach. You see, I never really liked writing. I liked stories. I liked the way they made life…comprehensible. I liked the way they made me feel. And while I did eventually learn to enjoy the craft itself, I discovered the reason why I wanted to write in the first place.
I wanted to help others feel what I felt when reading about Taran Wanderer and Theo the Printer’s Devil. Seaman Snowlock and Luffy D Monkey, Edward Elric and Drizzt Do’Urden. Love and Heartache. Companionship, Loneliness, Laughter, and Despair. Meaning.
Hope.
Of course, I also want to create unique worlds and interesting characters and gripping plots (and really cool fights). Who says I can’t do both?
I have since found new readers and new friends. I have discovered new stories and new truths, about myself and the world, and I hope to find many more. Secrets of the Sky Gods is the culmination of thousands of stories and dozens of life lessons but it is also only a first step.
If you find this one’s not for you, I still have countless stories to explore and worlds to share. Look forward to it.
