I would like to think that I'm a creative individual. It's a lifelong goal of mine to get a piece of my work published and enter the pantheon of authors. As long as I can remember I have tried to come up with stories, mostly to entertain my young brain and to give me something to do when my parents were watching television, my brother was on the computer, and my Game Boy was out of batteries. I started with action figures. I would sit in my room (at the time without a television) and have Goku from Dragon Ball Z fight the Sandrock Gundam robot, then come up with some ridiculous story as to why there were resorting to fisticuffs. Why? I have no clue, but it gave me something to do. Eventually, I got a pro wrestling ring and made a fake wrestling federation with my wrestling action figures (with the occasional Digimon and Mighty Duck). I became the booker for my fantasy federation. Everyone had a story and a feud they were involved in. I would come up with a backstory to why Blastoise beat Triple H for the World Heavyweight Title, and why the Blue Power Ranger turned on his tag team partner the Green Ranger and crush his ankle with a Tech Deck. This also started me down the path of fantasy wrestling booker. An activity I still regularly engage in.
It seems stupid to me now, but it kept me entertained, and above all established a love of storytelling that stuck with me. I have all my action figures, minus the wrestlers and ring, sitting in a box in my basement. I even kept my favorite Digimon and two Gundam models in my room. I'm staring at them as I type this. They're simply too sentimental for me to throw away. They nurtured the creative side in me that's never gone away. I'm hoping one day to hand that box to my son and tell him to go nuts.
Eventually I got a TV in my room and stopped playing with toys. I was growing up dammit! No time for toys now...
So I moved on to playing more video games.
Oh and video games of the late 90's and turn of the century. Pure abominations! Shitty sharp polygonal graphics, atrocious audio that makes BrokeNCYDE sound like the London Symphony Orchestra, wonky controls, and storylines that often made no sense (or had no story at all).
So again I made up stories for the games I was playing. If for any reason, to justify why I was playing such a turd to begin with.
Time moved on and I started actually reading novels. Because I felt the need to impress my parents I never spent much time in the children's section at Barnes and Noble, and even as a sixth grader, the 'young adult' genre made me want to regret any urge I had about picking up a paperback.
I ventured into the Science-Fiction / Fantasy aisle instead. I became drawn to the epic covers of pulp fantasy books, they looked more like reading a video game than those Pendragon books in the kid/teen/tween/whatever section of the store. I picked up some book (I don't even remember) and showed it to my parents. They were impressed I wanted to read such large book with small print. It was way above my reading level at the time, but I wanted to take a stab at it anyway.
Reading these books gave me two things. First off, it showed me how expansive a story can be. Fantasy novels drop you in a setting and immerse you into a world (something I've tried to adopt in my writing) and leave you there in an expansive story arc that would often last three books. The second gift it gave me was a massive increase in my vocabulary. Not to blow my own horn, but I was always gifted with a large lexicon and from an early age I was very well spoken. Reading always gave me a new word to wiggle into my daily conversations in some subconscious way to impress and dazzle others.
7th grade then descended upon me, and I was in that awkward, geeky, self-discovery phase everyone encounters in middle school. I didn't want to do my work, I hated everybody, girls didn't like me, and I was going through that goth crisis that seemed to hit my town in 2003. It was like a prelude to the emo scene thing, only in my opinion, much much worse.
All I wanted to do with my time was dress in black, be 'misunderstood', not give a fuck, and maybe kiss a girl. There was no reason to read or do school work, certainly not a point in my life where I consider myself an intellectual, or even sentient at that rate.
Life sure is angsty and bleak during that time between your testicles dropping and palming your first tit.
It was during this time I picked up my first comic book. I found a copy of Art Spiegelman's Maus in my school's library. I read both volumes in two days. A month later a friend handed me a comic book that has changed my life both better and worse.
I was given Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.
It could not have come at a more perfect time. I was a young misanthrope and the book stuck to me like Anne Rice on vampires. It was mind bending, ultra-violent, surreal, random, and most importantly, it made violence funny.
The collected graphic novel ran the circuit through all of my friends and eventually got destroyed by being in too many backpacks and lockers. We've replaced it over time. My copy is sitting to my left on a bookshelf stacked with all my other comics.
Both books had a deep impact on me. They showed me that comics could be more than just Spiderman saving Mary Jane, or Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Comics could be anything and everything. Vasquez's artwork for Johnny showed me that I didn't have to be a great artist (something I always lacked) to make a comic. His drawings were crude compared to a Marvel or DC comic book. He relied more on shading and greyscale to convey emotion more than anything else.
After being near-obsessed with Johnny the Homicidal Maniac I decided the one thing I would try doing was draw comics. I began to keep a marble composition book with me at all times. During school I would scribble down thoughts for stories or write in a journal I labeled my 'Die-ary', an homage (or blatant rip off) of Johnny's journal in the comic. Clever no? I began drawing comics, mainly of people I didn't like at the time (which was everyone) getting killed. My style was an exact copy of Vasquez's as I couldn't really draw any better than he did, nor did I care to try and improve my technique. Eventually, by the time 8th grade rolled around I had decided that drawing wasn't for me, and I ditched the composition book in favor of scribbling ideas in the edges of my notebooks.
Around this time I started my first blog as well. I joined Xanga and started blogging about my interesting middle school life, which, as I gaze at this Xanga from yesteryear, was horribly boring. I also used too many ellipses. Really, every other word is punctuated with a "..."
I also copy and pasted lyrics to show how I was feeling...
It wasn't a great start to blogging, and there I go again with the ellipses. Shit.
I think I went through three Xangas. One apparently for every year of school (7th, 8th, and 9th grade). All about my life. Nothing of interest whatsoever.
After reading that Xanga I'm glad I stepped away from blogging and writing altogether. I was too self-absorbed. I channeled any hatred I had towards myself rather than the world, which, in my opinion, makes for 80% of the interweb's social and cultural bloggers. Perez Hilton hates himself I guarantee it, he just attacks Hollywood the same way I attacked Hot Topic.
Sidebar to Perez Hilton; Read this, I mentioned you in it. Give me a mention. It's proper netiquette, and I need the site traffic.
I took a break from writing period until this came along, well the King of Ants LiveJournal specifically, but you get it. I took a break from my pulp sci-fi / fantasy and started examining classics, as well as historical non-fiction to become better well-rounded. There wasn't any time to write in high school, and I was better off without it.
This helps my creative pangs that I get day to day. Writing a bit about Slasher movies is a lot quicker than a novella about pain, the internet, and machismo-driven consumer-culture.
Did I just give something away there?
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