Origins in Arts

In my youth, I was deeply drawn to the mystical, from the secret passages and fantastical groves of my grandmother’s old manor to the forts my father helped us make out in the woods near the hunting cabin. My earliest literary influences were The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, The Chronicles of Narnia, Animorphs, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. However, when it came to writing, I didn’t move on from The Four Princesses until I came up with the idea for an original book that was based off… well, frankly, everything that I loved (which at that point also included Final Fantasy; specifically IX and VI) plus my dramatic teenaged life.

I still recall the day when the idea for an original story spawned: I was about 15 years old and I took one of those huge rolls of paper, spread it out on our cabin floor, and started writing down all of the characters and story plots that I could come up with. That story has had so many name changes over the years—it was initially called Fade to Black after the Metallica song, then Fade to the River when I wanted to give it a more unique name, and now I have it listed simply as Odyssey. Once it was finished, I then began another story set in the same universe/series with an American pen-pal that I met on the IGN Final Fantasy forums, called The Map of Time. We had such a good time writing together that we ended up doing a sequel to it called Lost in the Realm of No Time (which I admit was my fault, in that I fully based the book’s ending on “The Departed (Sun Is Going Down)” by Helloween, so it ends on a substantial cliffhanger). I still hope to someday find the energy to finish the rewrite of The Map of Time because there was a lot of potential in it, even though, reading back on it this decade, it was also pretty nonsensical. 

It’s worth mentioning that I became obsessed with heavy metal for the same reason that I became obsessed with writing—I loved stories. I was completely fed up with unrelatable pop songs (I was a dateless geek after all, so love songs got old after a while), so when I first heard “The Flight of Icarus” by Iron Maiden (not long after I had been studying Greek mythology in school), it changed everything. I didn’t realize that music could even exist if it wasn’t a love song, so this really rocked my whole existence. If you look through my old stories, you’ll find unending references to songs from bands like Iron Maiden, Helloween, and Blind Guardian, as well as a few less-metal acts like AFI and A Perfect Circle. I listened to nothing but ‘90s metal and movie/game scores when I was writing. One of my old novels was called Dream of Mirrors and I have a character fully based off “The Nomad” (which are both songs from Iron Maiden’s “Brave New World”). I know there are simply hundreds of ideas in those stories that were spawned from the music I listened to. Anything fantastical, storied, or Gothic-romantic (not pop-romantic) was pure fuel to my creative wildfire. 

Ultimately, I hit a point where, anytime I had a new idea, it was too big and exciting to go into the story I was writing. This led to what I called my personal Final Fantasy series (eventually titled The Tomes of Ra), which, by the time I abandoned the series, had expanded from Odyssey and The Map of Time into a 13-story extended universe (each story was a different world or continent that all shared the same pantheon). I drew many of my characters and over the years, I moved away from the more anime-styled cartoon drawing to a somewhat more realistic (or at least less exaggerated) style—you can see a few of them down below (these are among the newer drawings; I assure you that my older artwork was much worse, and many of these are re-draws). When they say a writer must write a million words of garbage before they write anything good? The Tomes of Ra were my million words. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have many friends at school (and even fewer outside of it), so rather than socializing with my peers, I bounded home from school and wrote tens of thousands of pages of high fantasy adventures. 

Back then, I had a feeling that writing was what I was made for. I was very conscious that this was my strongest skill, so I spent as much time as I could honing it. I had lofty dreams that I would someday turn those original Tomes of Ra into a video game series and I hoped to do so by getting a job as a staff writer at Bioware, which had its home base in Edmonton. However, their application process required intimate knowledge of Neverwinter Nights, which I had never played, so I lost interest in pursuing that path and decided to try writing novels instead of game scripts. I had hoped to go study Creative Writing in Edmonton, but was encouraged to prioritize something more practical, so I ended up doing Medical Transcription (which I switched to, as it was more writing-oriented than the medical coding class I had initially enrolled in). However, none of the Tomes of Ra have ever seen the light of day…