“Title?”, Good Question.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” -Kurt Vonnegut

Pinpointing an exact catalyst that started me on a path to writing is an extremely difficult question. I could start in my later years and go on and on about how To Kill a Mockingbird made me finally look around and realize that racism hides in off-hand comments in broad daylight. Or I could start in my formative early years and talk about how Dr.Seuss would enchant me to sleep until my Dad finally cracked the cover on an ancient copy of The Hobbit and my life was never the same. Catalyst questions are often the hardest because how am I to take the tangle of influences and deconstruct them until at last I find that one spark that never went out?

The first love of my life was reading, my second love was 90’s pop culture. I grew up with a brother who was ten years my senior, so my life went from Blue’s Clues to Angry Beavers real fast. I feasted upon the bright colors and laughed along with my brother to jokes I didn’t understand and I loved it. They were so ridiculous and they called to the strange and dark sense of humor that I didn’t even know was in my genetic code.

Soon after this, I wrote my first book, full color illustrations and everything. Impressive for a 5-year-old, right? I remember it fondly because it was about the three little bears eating Goldilocks for being a squatter and eating all their food. Also, I had four extra pages after my story was finished so the three little bears met a dog and creatively named “Mr.Dog” and they had a picnic. What a classic. I also remember my Mom not letting me watch Ren and Stimpy after this incident, which may in itself be a catalyst.

Soon after this my brother moved out, so I moved on to bigger and brighter early-2000's things. I had been really into The Wild Thornberrys and therefore incredibly into animals. I would read anything and everything about animals that I could get my grubby little hands on. This also began my fascination with dinosaurs, ZooBooks, National Geographic, Dinotopia, and Walking With Dinosaurs. Which was hilarious to my parents because I was so into animals and fossils but during my first trip to the Smithsonian I cried because you had to walk under the T-Rex skull to get to other parts of the museum and I was scared it was going to eat me. To this day, they don’t know its because I watched Jurassic Park even though they told me not to and it scared me so bad I was having war-flashbacks in the middle of the museum (sorry mom!).

The third, and probably greatest, loves of my life are cult classic films. I can’t remember how old I was when I lost my first tooth, but if you asked me what the day was like the first time my Mom showed me The Goonies I could tell you every detail of that mild North Carolina day. Or the day my Dad thought I was old enough to watch Clerks and Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. These movies altered the course of my life, they were so funny and so fantastic and people wrote them. I was infatuated. My sense of humor definitely comes from here.

The older I got, the more I started to lean more towards fantasy. Something about saving the world, adventures, magic, backstories, sword fights, I ate up all of it. To this day I read primarily fiction, always chasing that great escape of another world. As an Air Force child I moved so much that making and keeping friends was incredibly hard, but the characters I met in my favorite books are still people that stick around with me always.

Some examples of my favorite fictions are: The Hobbit, The Lightning Thief series, A Wrinkle in Time, The Last Unicorn, Good Omens, The Night Circus, Stardust, Sandman, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and many more; but that is just a lot and realize I read too much.

Around this same time was when music really started to effect my writing as well. In my first creative writing class, I wrote a whole short story just based on Imagine Dragon’s “Radioactive”. Music was providing that same great escape feeling that fiction was, it still does to this day.

So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that catalysts come from everywhere. A snippet of conversation we hear on the street, that feeling you get when you eat your favorite meal, other authors, music, film, a great outdoor writing space, anything. Writing has existed for so long because it allows us to say what we can’t seem to explain through spoken words. I know for a fact that I have left a lot of my influences out of this, but there are so many that I can’t quite keep track; and to me that is such a beautiful and human thing.

“You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.” -Neil Gaiman, Stardust