Age: Old enough to know better
Gender: Depends on my mood
Hair Colour: Currently kind of red
Eye Colour: Blue... I think
I have gone by a few aliases over the years, and I have been coming up with stories for longer than I care to admit to. When I was little my brother would sometimes sleep in my room and I would tell him weird and wonderful versions of fairy tales, often featuring our family or friends, to help him go to sleep.
In school I had an excellent imagination and I would often write stories whenever I could, often telling silly versions of whatever we happened to be studying at the time, and a friend got me involved with fanfiction, which encouraged my writing and improved my skills as a writer a lot over the years.
Mostly I wrote fantasy stories, or parodies, but occasionally I would try something else, or mix things together to create urban fantasy before I knew what urban fantasy was. I loved, and still love, dragons and magic and an epic battle between good and bad, but I also liked putting strange things into the world that we recognised.
I still write a lot of fantasy and urban fantasy, though I have tried turning my hand to sci-fi, romance, and comedy. I also, on occasion, write poems, and have even composed a couple of songs. And although I don't really write much in the way of fanfiction anymore, I still love knowing that there are communities of writers creating their own pieces of fiction using my favourite characters.
Then, back in 2008, I found out about a thing called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where people would try to write a brand new 50,000 word novel from start to finish during the month of November. I was intrigued and so I signed up to take part. And smashed the word count by about fifteen thousand words, though I never actually finished the book.
I took a two year gap from doing the challenge, and then, in 2011, I wrote three books, each done over the course of a month. These were the original drafts of the final three books of a series that I am currently working on, and the first of which I self published a few years ago.
After that each year I set myself my own goals because I had realised that I could reach 50k in 30 days too easily (In fact I could reach 200k in 30 days with only a little more effort), and so one year (2014 to be exact) I decided to write 500 drabbles- short stories of exactly 100 words each- and some of these have become some of my favourite pieces of writing.
I have also managed to write four stories where every character and every encounter was randomly generated by dice rolls, and I have even managed to write 50,000 words in two days, which involved drinking 12 cups of coffee within the first 18 hours or so.
Writing stories has been, for a long time, a form of self-medication. it is both a grounding method, and a form of escapism. I have worked through some of the worst times in my life through writing, and have come to some surprising realisations because of it. My writing can sometimes feel so very personal, and yet, at the same time, I always write with the intention of it being public.
Feel free to get in touch with me, or follow me on Twitter, or like my page on Facebook, and hopefully, together, we'll explore different worlds, meet different creatures, and acknowledge different Gods
