This, of course, is me. I grew up in Monmouth, IL, where I attended public schools and quickly developed a passion for drawing science fiction characters and writing stories.

I grew up on cable television, Star Wars, LEGOs, and various other instrumental circumstances. I was heir to the pros and cons of the Western Frontier ideology that penetrates every pore of Midwestern life. While I deeply enjoyed watching shows like Land of the Lost, Robotech, and The Rugrats, my greatest passion was watching movies–the likes of E.T., Return of the Jedi, Batman, and Mission: Impossible. In later years, my dad would eventually introduce me to the films of American cinema lore: Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Brian de Palma’s Scarface, Stephen Spielberg’s Duel, and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. These more examinatory films of Americana and humanity fostered a greater appreciation for the world with which I was only vaguely familiar–most of my younger years had been spent in a world mostly my own.

My second grade teacher, Mr. Carl Shaub, was an instrumental figure in my formative life because he had the wisdom to allow such young children free time within the traditionally hectic, structured curriculum. After our spelling tests, we were allowed (if memory serves; I wholeheartedly believe it does in this instance) a full hour of freedom. Many would play games–tick tack toe, various puzzle games, etc.–others would build fortresses out of the vast collection of wooden blocks (I occasionally participated in this activity, envisioning massive otherworldly civilizations and on one particular day made up my mind that I would one day own a giant candy and toy factory; how quaintly American). On a more typical day, I would spend the full hour drawing characters from my imagination, and making up stories to explain their worlds. Over the course of that year, and those that followed, this became my very identity.

This affinity for drawing and imagination was further developed as a result of ample encouragement from my grade school art teacher, Ms. Lynn Finch, who constantly urged me to nurture my artistic gifts. I willingly obliged–everyone, after all, had to have something they were good at, and I was pretty much running out of options by that point (or so I assumed).

By fifth grade, I’d become pretty comfortable with my position within the grand universe as an insignificant child of various geeky tendences and one solitary talent (drawing–my stories up until that point were fairly horrid, though The Cement Man was fairly Nebula-Award material for a five-year-old kindergartener). My teacher, whom I wasn’t very fond of admittedly, gave our class the greatest homework assignment of my life: We were to get into groups of 3 to 4, write a short story of any kind, and illustrate it. I ended up doing most of the work, both illustration and story writing, but I loved it. I gave birth to a fairly short-lived saga of spacefairing adolescents which lived only in infamy, though it garnered a two Young Authors’ Award for best story and best illustrations a year or so later.

In seventh grade, I entered the world of middle school, where friends are few and bullies are many. I fell fairly silent in the social world, retreating into my storytelling and watching (it must have been at least 200 viewings) of the then-just-released Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This, as fate would have it, was the same time period in which I discovered the Xbox video game system’s prized launch title Halo: Combat Evolved, which I can safely claim to be one of the best video games of all time (right up there with Super Mario 64 and Pac-Man, people!).

When I was thirteen years old, it occured to me that I had but one remaining chance to win the presumably unconquerable district-wide Young Authors’ Award for Best Story in the School District. So I decided to write my first science fiction novel; a daunting task for an eighth-grader who scarcely considered his writing abilities worth the 8 1/2 x 11-in. paper on which his stories were printed. In the course of two months’ time, I had written a 200-page science fiction story about one starfighter pilot’s discovery of a version of Mars existing within a dimension parallel to our own (pretty shoddy science we’re talking about here) and his eventual triumphant return to Earth. The story itself was a failure as far as the vast realm of fiction is concerned, but for me it was the greatest accomplishment of my relatively average adolescent life. And most importantly, I won the contest; I gained the confidence needed to affirm my suspicions that writing science fiction was what I wanted to do with my life more than anything else.

Since then, of course, my reading has become more constant, and my mind more matured. Resultantly, my criticism of myself has harshened and my confidence has been slightly marred by the grandeur of my heroes’ works. The outlandish idea that someday I could even hope to exist anywhere near the likes of Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen King, or Ray Bradbury had been shattered through the dissillusionment that comes with encountering snobbish elders, working a dead-end job at sixteen, and having your heart crushed underfoot by teenage girls who didn’t quite consider your aspirations to be a turn-on.

I’ve taken several creative writing courses so far in my college career, and am currently attending Monmouth College in pursuit of a Bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing (and likely an Art Minor as well). I’m hard at work more than ever before, crafting stories one after the other: Writing a first draft, revising–while revising, beginning another story–then going back to revise that story after the former is finished. I have yet to achieve professional publication, but I’m striving toward that goal quite rigorously. My hope is to document and describe all aspects of my long road to publication in the wondrous world of speculative fiction here in this blog, and to share it with the rest of the world of aspiring writers.