The first step in an addiction...

...is admitting that everyone else says/assumes/tells everyone/spreads rumors that you have a problem.

When I was around thirteen, I started writing. In truth, it started long before then, but you can't really trace these things back to a particular genesis, can you?

Alright, I can, I suppose, though all the pieces were already in place, like some queer sort of self-inflicted nerd ambush. But the true catalyst, my friends, came when a friend of mine, Chris Magerl, got our English teacher, Glenda Shaw, to read a scene or so from his short story. It was a short story about a guy who falls asleep a teenage nerd, and wakes up in a serious fantastical sword and sorcery setting, wherein he is a big, muscle-bound knight. It had nothing to do with the story, really, which is not to say that Chris's story was schlock. I mean, we were teenagers. Everything we wrote was sort of potentially good but trapped in schlock-dom, yes, but what I'm trying to say is that Chris could've written anything, cut-pasted dictionary definitions for scientific terminology in it, except for one line of dialogue that he got got Glenda Shaw to read aloud to the class:

"Neville, you bastard!"

Seriously. The fact that my buddy got our teacher to say bastard out loud made me a writer. You can laugh and lampoon me all you like, but in truth, it came down to the power of words and what they do to people. What they can move us to do that we might not otherwise. And it took years for me to fully realize the unfathomable depth of what that meant--I would be twenty-one and writing a poem in English class about my father's recent death, and catch this dreamy amazon who wanted nothing to do with me suddenly crying as she was reading over my shoulder, and suddenly realize yet again how much a few words can do when properly arranged on one of those yawning white pages. (Her name was Sara(h) something or other, and she literally was something like six-plus feet tall. And maybe it was because I was writing a poem about my dead father, but I didn't ever try to turn that teary source of praise into something of an altogether different sort of dialogue, though I cannot say that I've never done so...)

Chris got me into other stuff, too. Dungeons and Dragons. Well, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, really, but to the layman, there's really no difference.

That's right, I was a gamer. Hell, I am a gamer in remission, awaiting relapse like a junky looking for his fix. What sort of gamer I was/am has changed over the years. I was a hack-and-slash, dual-wielding AD&D freak through high school, went more story-driven and added White Wolf's Storyteller system to my bag of tricks and became a Game Master in my early years of college. I went through MMORPGs when they were text-based unix engines called Multi-User Dungeons and was an example and enforcer of the early Darwinian learning curve in such online game systems.

But the story was always what drew me, the idea of creating a story and living it with my friends, making it up as we go along. I'd done theatre, but there, we had scripts. This was free-form, choose-your-own-adventure, no-shit cooperative story. And they let me function as editor/narrator/stage manager.

So, in a way, I was writing stories with Chris back in junior high school, I suppose.

But the first story I really wrote was the fantasy novel I wrote in high school, Homecomings. I've recently scrapped the old draft and started rewriting it, and I figure that by the time I turn 50, it might be close to done. Given that it's the first part of a seven part series, I guess I'm planning on living to a ripe old age or having my consciousness downloaded to the internet (which might expedite things considerably, since then there wouldn't be girls, booze, and life to impede my creative efforts).

And this is the forum where I'm gonna sound off about all of this: sci-fi and fantasy writing, scifi and fantasy in general, and how all of this must be the fault of folks who enabled me along the way, from Magerl with his little "bastard" line to Seeforth and his letting me paw through his cast-off gaming books every time I come home. So, watch this space or run and hide. You now know what you've stumbled across.