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4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!
When I was twelve years old (after just having written a novel length bit of Star Wars fanfiction--which I did not know was fanfiction at the time!), I was like: I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT UNICORNS. But! I didn't want to write about 80s-frou-frou unicorns, I wanted to write something that made people feel. I'd just read The Last Unicorn for the first time, and it moved me so much, I didn't even know what to do with all that feeling. So, I channeled it into a story. Which is, thank the gods, lost.
It was titled: Unicorn Child, Unicorn Mage. I poured my heart into it for a few months, and when I read it over, I thought: this is terrible. Even then. I thought it was terrible. It was.
There was a planet of shapeshifters, and everyone had a human form and an animal form. The greatest of these animals was the unicorn. A piece of themselves would become an object that they had to keep on themselves at all times, or the shapeshifting wouldn't work. For the unicorns, it was their horns--they would transform into a weapon or a musical instrument or a farming tool...the main character's name was Bane (though, in the beginning of the story, it was something nice and musical because Bad Things Had Not Yet Happened To Him), and his horn transformed into a flute, until the devil dogs came and tore the village apart, and all of his family and everyone died, save for him. His coat went from white to black, because of his sorrow, and his horn changed into a sword, and he went on a quest for revenge, finding this waif of a girl (the Unicorn Child) to protect on the way, and there were spaceships and elemental corridors and people who wore skulls for helmets, and it was kind of like Mad Max, and it was really bad.
Heady with my success of Writing A Real Book, I went right on to the next one. It was entitled The Komunyst, and was a (I hoped at the time) political fairy tale (Jenn and I have since talked about this, and she said: WHAT WERE YOU DOING WRITING A POLITICAL FAIRY TALE, YOU WERE TWELVE. To which I responded: I WAS WEIRD.), about what might have happened if World War II continued, and the end of the world had happened, and we went back to feudalism and riding around on horses all day and trying not to die. It was epically horrible, but I was ridiculously proud of it, and was on fire.
Thank the gods, my stories evolved over time. I kept writing, and each was marginally better than the last, though I wrote my share of incredibly bad horror, science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Around the age of eighteen/nineteen, I began to write Young Adult novels, and that's been my baby genre ever since. :)
When I was twelve years old (after just having written a novel length bit of Star Wars fanfiction--which I did not know was fanfiction at the time!), I was like: I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT UNICORNS. But! I didn't want to write about 80s-frou-frou unicorns, I wanted to write something that made people feel. I'd just read The Last Unicorn for the first time, and it moved me so much, I didn't even know what to do with all that feeling. So, I channeled it into a story. Which is, thank the gods, lost.
It was titled: Unicorn Child, Unicorn Mage. I poured my heart into it for a few months, and when I read it over, I thought: this is terrible. Even then. I thought it was terrible. It was.
There was a planet of shapeshifters, and everyone had a human form and an animal form. The greatest of these animals was the unicorn. A piece of themselves would become an object that they had to keep on themselves at all times, or the shapeshifting wouldn't work. For the unicorns, it was their horns--they would transform into a weapon or a musical instrument or a farming tool...the main character's name was Bane (though, in the beginning of the story, it was something nice and musical because Bad Things Had Not Yet Happened To Him), and his horn transformed into a flute, until the devil dogs came and tore the village apart, and all of his family and everyone died, save for him. His coat went from white to black, because of his sorrow, and his horn changed into a sword, and he went on a quest for revenge, finding this waif of a girl (the Unicorn Child) to protect on the way, and there were spaceships and elemental corridors and people who wore skulls for helmets, and it was kind of like Mad Max, and it was really bad.
Heady with my success of Writing A Real Book, I went right on to the next one. It was entitled The Komunyst, and was a (I hoped at the time) political fairy tale (Jenn and I have since talked about this, and she said: WHAT WERE YOU DOING WRITING A POLITICAL FAIRY TALE, YOU WERE TWELVE. To which I responded: I WAS WEIRD.), about what might have happened if World War II continued, and the end of the world had happened, and we went back to feudalism and riding around on horses all day and trying not to die. It was epically horrible, but I was ridiculously proud of it, and was on fire.
Thank the gods, my stories evolved over time. I kept writing, and each was marginally better than the last, though I wrote my share of incredibly bad horror, science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Around the age of eighteen/nineteen, I began to write Young Adult novels, and that's been my baby genre ever since. :)
dorky
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