The beginning of… something
Content Note: a few short mentions of sexual abuse and suicide in fiction.
My love affair with writing began when I was in third grade. Our teacher had us read an incomplete story fragment from a workbook, and the exercise at the end of the assignment was to “finish the story.” The idea that I could write my own stories, as opposed to voraciously reading them as I’d been doing since I was three years old, absolutely blew my mind.
The first story I ever wrote was inspired by one of my favorite books at the time, a book about different breeds of cats. Playful American shorthair cats, glamorous Persian cats, chatty Siamese cats. My imagination gave the cats the power of speech, and a few special cats even had wings. I amused myself writing about their adventures together, which were nonsensical to an adult’s eye, but endless possibility to a child’s.
I became enamored with fantasy fiction after reading a series called Secret of the Unicorn Queen. The main character was a 14-year-old girl named Sheila with a genius scientist friend à la Doc Brown from Back to the Future, except his deus ex machina was a dimension-traveling machine, not a time-traveling one. Following a convenient accident, she fell into a fantasy world of unicorn-riding warrior women fighting an evil sorcerer. Since Sheila had no idea how to get back home, she spent her time training with the eponymous Unicorn Queen Illyria and her band of warriors, and fell in love with the Queen’s brother, Damian. Eventually her scientist friend found a way to bring her back, but she returned after another happy accident that reunited her with her second family, and further adventures were had.
I wanted to write about unicorn-riding warrior women, too, but I didn’t want to copy Secret of the Unicorn Queen. So I made my band of female warriors pegasus riders, and added dragons into the mix. By then, I’d had my first taste of Dungeons & Dragons, the popular fantasy roleplaying game, and I’d also played hours upon hours of the Sega Genesis game Altered Beast, which let the player take control of a half-human, half-dragon hybrid. I was still only nine, maybe ten years old, so lacked the restraint to cherry-pick and streamline my inspirations. No — my story had to have flying unicorns, warrior women cursed into weredragon form, a hierarchy of evil dragons with gemstone scales, and a witch supervillain that looked like a pink, anthropomorphic cat. Everything went into my melting pot of creativity and became my first attempt at a novel, The Crystal of Dragonia.
I had what was, back then, considered an early puberty (10 years old). The heady rush of hormones and emotional imbalance led to some darker elements emerging in my stories of Dragonia. One instance had the main character tortured repeatedly by a cruel diamond dragon, aptly named Diamiroth, who crushed her legs underfoot and healed her from the damage only to repeat the process ad nauseam. Another involved the sorceress Darkilorne (yup, my naming conventions were top notch as a child), a tragic character who saw herself as cursed and irredeemable, spurning the love of the chivalrous blue weredragon who hoped to “save” her.
As I entered middle school, my interest in Origin Systems’ Wing Commander overcame my avid consumption of fantasy novels. With that came my next childhood opus named, simply and perhaps embarrasingly, The Cats. The main antagonists of Wing Commander were the Kilrathi, an alien race of anthropomorphic cats no doubt inspired by the Man-Kzin Wars series of military-SF stories created by Larry Niven of Ringworld fame. So, of course, my story involved humans in space fighting a race of cat-like aliens from the Khalenti Dominion. I even managed a crossover with Dragonia by including one of the races I’d made for that setting, contrasting the magically inclined cat-people of Dragistah (later renamed Zarynth) with the warmongering Khalenti, who had previously subjugated their “lesser” cousins.
One particular character I focused a lot of my writing power on was Akhalla Thyzanalith, a Zarynthian who was recruited by the Khalenti Dominion as a starfighter. She had an on-again, off-again relationship with Khijhiris Avish’tzar-Vakhrana, a prince of the Dominion who struggled with his culture’s penchant for violence and machismo, and was seen as “weak” compared to his younger brother, the favored heir. As a starfighter of the Dominion, she earned the sobriquet “Akhalla the Cutthroat” for her skill at taking down Terran aces, but much like Khijiris, despised her position as a subjugated Zarynthian forced to fight for her superiors. Eventually they tried to defect together, but the attempt failed, leading to Akhalla’s rape by Khijiris’ brother and ultimately, her suicide.
Writing became a way for me to cope with a lot of the teenage angst and self-loathing I felt in those years. I had an awkward childhood as a nerdy social reject, lacked the confidence to stand up for myself against bullying, and likely harbored the beginnings of mental illness that would plague me throughout my adult life. A lot of my characters were subjected to the suffering I wanted to inflict on myself, or thought that I deserved. Besides Akhalla, there was Tatsumaki, a suicidal young man burdened with the birthright of his bloodline, but lacking the fortitude to continue his father’s legacy; Ryshassa, turned to darkness after a well-meaning band of heroes destroyed her lover, a general who stayed stubbornly loyal to his corrupt King; and Nina Winland, foul-mouthed princess of a dying race who endured an alcoholic mother and sexually abusive father, then rebelled against the prophecies that forced her into a role she never asked for.
Tatsumaki, Ryshassa and Nina were all original characters I wrote for fanfiction, but became vehicles for my own catharsis through my teenage and early college years. I wouldn’t necessarily say any of that writing was good writing — it was certainly unpolished and unpublishable — but it was definitely necessary for my mental health in the years I had no other outlet to express my inner feelings. At times, my writing (when shared online) helped others feel less alone in their own depression, anxiety and trauma. The few bits of heartfelt feedback I received helped me to appreciate the power of words and the Internet to connect like-minded people and bring them some measure of hope.
In my college and later years, my interest in writing drifted from amateur fantasy/SF and fanfiction to blogging and online roleplaying. For about 8 years, I was a prolific blogger, writing very personal accounts of my struggles with depression and low self-esteem peppered with detailed descriptions of my favorite hobbies. Those posts are now offline, as they are extremely raw and candid, characteristic of my emotional state pre-treatment. I am now in a much better place emotionally, with a much stronger support base between doctors, family and friends, and I want all the writing I have online from now on to reflect the successes I have achieved despite of — and perhaps even because — of my hardships.
I am still a very prolific roleplayer, but I do more of my roleplaying offline than online nowadays. It does still require a great deal of writing, though, since most of the time I am the gamemaster rather than a player. That means writing up descriptions for NPCs (non-player characters) and locations, coming up with historical events, creating plot hooks and scenarios for players to pursue, and other fun details that may or may not be used in game, but help flesh out the game world as a living, breathing place. Some of the games I run have over 100 pages of notes containing preparation for future sessions and summaries of previous sessions. So roleplaying games are definitely where a lot of my writing efforts go nowadays.
In recent years, my blog site has gone into disrepair, but my desire to write long-winded posts hasn’t gone away. Unfortunately perhaps for my Facebook friends, I‘ve been fulfilling that desire through Facebook posts detailing my thoughts about current events, political views and hobbies. I figured that if I’m going to be so verbose, I might as well do so on a medium (ha) that could potentially reach more people who are interested in reading my words. That way, I also have more incentive to hone my writing skills and come up with interesting topics and perspectives to keep my feed fresh.
So here I am… and hopefully, this will be the first, not the last, article I write on Medium.
