Flights of fancy

If I had to credit anyone for my initial desire to write, it would my 4th Grade teacher, Mrs. Feldman. I hated it at the time, but every week she would make us write in a journal. She didn’t care what we wrote as long as it made sense. I decided to write stories. Usually they revolved around characters from my favorite TV shows or movies: Buck Rodgers, Battlestar Galactica, Starsky & Hutch, James Bond, just as a sampling.

Little did I know back then that I was writing what is now know as fanfic. I continued to dabble in the fanfic throughout high school. When I got into college, I took creative writing, composition, script writing, whatever looked fun and interesting. I enjoyed the creative and script writing the most. But I didn’t get really involved in writing until a silly TV show called “The X-Files”. I was hooked on it from day one and jumped feet first into the internet and heavy fanfic writing for the first time. I didn’t seem to matter what I wrote serious m/f stories, just for the sake of writing sex stories, slash stories… people seem to like them. They said I had a great knack for getting the voice of the characters and their personality down perfectly. Or that’s what they told me anyway.

I was never paid for any of my writing but I did have number stories published in fanzines (magazines filled with fan written stories) for Highlander: The Series and Ares (from the Hercules and Xena universe) specific zines. I also had a couple of co-written scripts submitted though never picked up. One was for Sliders called “The Celluloid Railroad” and one for “The X-Files” whose title escapes me at the moment. That has been the closest I’ve have come to getting published.

My muse left for awhile, after the death of Kevin Smith, who played Ares. So much of my fanfic at that time was Ares based even though the shows had gone off the air. I had no motivation to write at that point. Then along comes another show, “Supernatural”, another show I was hooked on from day one. My motivation and muse returned in the form of the character of John Winchester, the father of the two main characters. Jeffrey Dean Morgan portrayed him and for the longest time held the #1 spot in my fangirl heart. (That spot is now held by one of the gentlemen mentioned in the last paragraphs of this post.) Among my friends he was referred to as “My Future Ex-Husband” 😀 So once again I began writing my fanfic. Unfortunately the character was killed off in season 2 but I still wrote, sometimes about that character’s past or sometimes about his sons, Sam and Dean, the main characters in “Supernatural”.

In 2006 I discovered something called National Novel Writer’s Month. It takes place in November every year. The idea/goal is to write a minimum of a 50,000 word story in those 30 days. That equates to approximately 1667 word a day. Not as easy as it may seem. So with the help and encouragement of friends, I plotted and planned and brainstormed the last couple weeks of October in preparation to write my very first, all original novel, called “Been Here and There”, a bit of a supernatural story, not the TV show but the ghostie type stuff. The main character, McKenna Scott, is your average every day girl living in NYC. Until she starts have strange dreams about a castle she has never seen. Shortly after, she receives a package from an attorney in Scotland . An aunt she never knew left her a cottage and some property there. In the package with the legal papers were a necklace and a picture of a castle. It’s the same castle she’s been dreaming about. The story follows her on her journey to figure out just what these increasingly realistic dreams about a time long ago and a castle in a foreign land have to do with her.

I actually hit the 50,000 word mark with a few days left to go until the end of the month. I was ecstatic that I actually made the goal! And even more so because it was entirely original. I’ve not done the challenge since then. I always have one excuse or another but really it was the lack of motivation, within myself more so than have any external force to prod me along. In fact, I didn’t really write much of anything after that.

Last year, 2012, was a particularly rough one for me. But at the end of the year, my friend, Val, introduced me to 3 things, well, people really. And that’s figuratively and virtually. I have yet to meet them in person. The first was Stephen Amell and a new TV show called “Arrow”. I’d recently taken a liking to comic books turn movies so I figured I’d give that one a try. Plus even if I wasn’t enamored with the show,  Stephen Amell was very easy on the eyes. My muse decided to make another appearance and I started writing a couple of Arrow fanfic stories.

Then came the introduction of the last 2 of the trio. Both happened at the same time, shortly after the into to SA and “Arrow”. It was in November. She poked and prodded me to follow Ed Quinn and Scott Levy on Twitter. Ed I was familiar with because I had watched “Eureka”. Scott was a little different. He hadn’t been on any major TV shows or movies that I had remember seeing BUT it clicked that Val had met him at a convention in 2001. One of the only conventions I didn’t go to with her when I lived in S. CA. Another flicker of recognition came with “The Privateers”a show that he had a role in along with Karl Urban (whom I’d met many times because of his roles on Herc & Xena). What truly hooked me on these two gentlemen was how interactive and generous they were/are with the fans on Twitter. I became a bit more taken with one of them because of something that happened in December but, as I said in another post, I’m not going to go into detail about the who or what because some day I hope to tell that person face to face.

So now you might be asking, what the hell does all that have to do with writing?? And hurry up because I’m about to fall asleep!

Well, those two gentlemen are the basis for the two main characters in another completely original story I am working on. “A Brother’s Trust” is the working title. A family is torn apart after one of two brothers is convicted of a major crime and spends 10 years in a federal penitentiary. When that brother gets out, he seeks out the other to try and reconcile as well as to prove that he was framed. Naturally, nothing goes smoothly.

I work on it as well as writing my own brand of snarky but truthful reviews of Ed and Scott’s work (when it can be found) and posting it and other stuff on this blog. It feels good to write again. Even though it’s only 17 days into the new year, the writing of the story, the reviews, and the little blurbs on my blog have been very therapeutic and healing. The events of last year (a light version of which you can read about in my “Does Time Really Heal All Wounds” post if you really want to know) took and still take a very heavy toll on me. But, the writing I’ve been doing seems to be easing the pain a little.

And it’s fun 🙂 And it’s all Val’s fault!