Why I Write - OR - Why I Put Myself Through This Torture

I’ve been writing stories off and on since I was 8 years old. I was a weird kid, in that I read a lot. I had the entire pantheons of several different mythologies memorized as a kid, and I had read a lot of western* classics (e.g. Verne, Wells, Dickins, Dumas, Twain, etc.) by the time I was in middle school.

*not western novels, I’m talking Western (European, American) as opposed to Eastern (Russian, Chinese)

As a young kid, I wrote a story about how volcanoes were actually prisons for gods that had pissed off other gods, and Link from the Legend of Zelda Series accidentally released one of these gods (actually a goddess, as she was based on Tiamat, the Sumerian/Babylonian goddess of chaos and the sea), and had to team up with the Ninja Turtles and Gambit (of the X-men) to stop her. I never showed anyone this story, which is disappointing, because you can bet my mom would have kept it, and I would be able to go back and look at it. It’s gone now, but that right there, that is why I write. Because I am still eleven years old on the inside, constantly thinking of how many awesome things there are in the world, and wondering how I can write awesome stories about them.

This is an old world. There are prophecies and myths and gods and legends and heroes and magic and technology and plots and secrets and bodies and explosions and conspiracies. There is joy and sorrow and regret and rage beauty and ugliness and hate and love and passion and lust. There are sociopaths and assassins and accountants and spies and ninjas and CEOs and presidents and construction workers and secretaries and models and transients and hunters and farmers. There is so much damned material to work with, how can I not try to make up awesome adventures?

 Fuck, I mean, just look at the upcoming Christmas holiday; There’s virgin birth and infanticide and eastern mystics and portents in the sky and prophecies and saviors. AND THAT’S ONLY THE STRICTLY CHRISTIAN VERSION! That doesn’t even take into account Santa Claus or Father Christmas or Crampus or Jack the Pumpkin King or BlackPeter (aka Zwarte Piet, a Dutch thing, look it up, it’s ridiculous).

Basically, I write because I can’t fucking help it, there is too much awesome stuff that hasn’t been combined into an even more awesome monstrosity of a story.