An Introduction

I think the first story I wrote was called "Mike on Fog Island" back in second grade. Now, I'm not entirely sure of this, but it's at the very least the first one that I can remember - though it very well could have been a poorly illustrated Godzilla fan fiction piece around the same time. "Mike on Fog Island" was also poorly illustrated, and primarily a picture book.

Mike was the main character - he was a weasel. This was when I thought weasels were just about the coolest animal out there, as my dad had told me a story about seeing an ermine while deer hunting under a corn feeder (this was when corn feeders were still legal in the northeastern part of Michigan). Mike was a detective, in the vein of the gang from Scooby-Doo as I did not yet have an inkling as to what a private detective was. He had a raccoon for a sidekick. I'm pretty sure there were other team members - a blue jay sounds about right.

Anyway, they were on this spooky island somewhere in Lake Michigan called Fog Island - think Skull Island from the King Kong mythos. There was some kind of ghostly shenanigans going on from what I remember, and a regular talking, personified animal was behind it all. I really liked Scooby-Doo back then.

My writing would then take a break after second grade, though my reading picked up in a serious manner. I was reading adult Godzilla books by Marc Cerasini in third grade. That was a great series from what I can remember, by the way. I should give it another go. Also worth noting is that my storytelling did not take a break. You see, my dad had started taking me deer hunting around that time. And what I learned about deer hunting was that it was all about the story you could tell afterward. We would also drive through the woods during the majority of the year that wasn't deer season, and once again it was all about the story you could tell. Once we got stuck in a ton of snow and had to walk ten miles out through that snow to the cottage. I was in second grade. That was a darn good story.

Come high school though my love for stories and storytelling once again met up with a love for writing. I took Creative Writing, though I'm not sure why, I think something else had rekindled my love for writing.

But I took it anyway. And I took Creative Writing II. And my high school even offered a class called Literature & Suspense, where I once again got to write a story. I even got published in a high school literary magazine one year with an awful short story called "The Maze".

Writing fiction had become my passion. I discovered Dean Koontz and wanted to be just like him. I once managed to exchange an email with James Rollins. Life was good.

So then I went to college and did what I thought any normal person with my passion would do - I went into Education. To be fair, I had always thought I would be a teacher, and had enjoyed working with students as a fifth grade camp counselor in high school. I also enjoyed being a resident assistant in college and still love working with students to this day.

And I did manage to slip one college course of Creative Writing into my schedule one semester. And that was awesome.

Back in high school I started developing story ideas, far more than I wrote. Eventually some of these story ideas started merging in my mind. I used a spreadsheet to keep track. Then some stories that I had already written began to change and merge with stories I had not yet written. This continued into college and continued after college.

And here I am today, with an elaborate shared universe of stories that are all more-or-less interconnected. The stories combine my man loves and interests: hunting, mysteries, the great outdoors, superheroes, westerns, Native American mythology, archery, hockey, craft beer, Michigan, the Great Lakes, Scooby-Doo.

Last summer, the first summer that I did not have a summer job (a perk of being a teacher I truthfully had never given much thought to before as I had been summer teaching before) I tried to write what I thought and still think is the first novel in a series of seven that will be the central focus and launching point of this shared universe.

Yikes, what a mess. I managed about a 110 pages in Microsoft Word before throwing in the towel. Summer had ended after all. Some friends read it, and said some nice things as could be expected. Was it any good? Well, are first drafts ever? I'm not sure.

This past summer I decided that had been far too ambitious, so I tried a different story based very loosely on a one-off true story my dad had told me. That then merged with my shared universe and became a quasi-prequel. That also turned out to be a mess.

Now, for NaNoWriMo, I'm attempting to restart my first novel. I'm about 20,000 words in, and not really feeling it.

Anyway, this really long post is to tell you who I am as a writer currently. Storytelling and writing are in my blood, whether that means I ever get published or not. And now, I've decided to start a blog to tell the many stories of my attempts to tell a story.

Thanks for reading all of that. I'm hoping to fall into a schedule with my posts here, but we'll have to let that play out right now.