Especially for LDS and Friends!

When I first started writing I know it was for escape. I was one of those emotionally sensitive, over-active imagination, semi-reclusive, know-it-all teens. I always loved the arts - reading, writing and art. I think particularly at first, my Mother didn't understand. I had started off in like 7th grade where I got hooked on Dragonlance fantasy books. Borrowed one from my older brother when I was bored. Read it in 3 days and went back for more. Then in 9th grade a teacher (most kids regarded her as a nut) assigned us to write a Holloween shortstory. I watched fellow students blow it off and write a paragraph. And she would just beam and gush over how wonderful it was. I rolled my eyes and decided that I would show them. I had had some exposure to methods of brainstorming and basic writing skills and of course I was reading. So I started brainstorming and drafting ideas for a complex story that had next to nothing to do with Halloween and resembled a cheap ripoff of Lady Hawk combined with Dragonlance elements. As I wrote it, the storyline quickly abandoned Lady Hawk but was as sterotyped, melodramatic, cliche, fantasy soap-opera. The first draft took me 6 months and was 18 chapters long. I was out of the class that started it and had even moved to a different state. That teacher never read more than a handful of pages. Several years later I learned that she had passed away. But I certainly plan to acknowledge her in Hall of Secrets when it is published.

By then I was hooked. My obsession often bothered my Mother and she would even try to forbid me from writing "for the weekend". It turned into a game when we would be packing for a trip. I would stuff binders of story draft and notes in my bags and she would demand that I leave them home. Sure I left the binders, but never the story. I got creative in downsizing to one binder, then even down to a thin folder. Her resistance was futile. At family reunions she would complain about me sitting for hours alone in the woods, writing, when we supposed to be visiting. But truth to be told, long before I had found reading or writing I had felt like a sort of outcast - a loner. In some ways my writing gained more attention than I might have otherwise because some of my cousins would come asking if they could create a character for my books.(a habit I picked up early in my writing)

I know that my Mother kept waiting for me to grow up and get involved with something other than fantasy. But especially in my writing I was stubborn and resent English and Writing teachers that all pressured me to write other things. It's funny because years later, after I've left college and my Mother has passed away, Now I have plans to branch out of Fantasy and write an contemp LDS book this fall and a sci-fi next fall. Just can't force some people. Let them grow into it and they will explore at their own pace.

-Renegade