I have always loved making up stories. The writing came much later. But the stories … oh, the stories. From an Indian princess with a penchant for hording things in her pockets to the circus clown with a nose shaped like a smile and the “driest” hair, I had a talent for imaginative tales that seemed to come alive in my head.
I cultivated this talent in an unusual way. Every night when I had trouble falling to sleep, I would invent a story, with characters full of depth, an exciting or dangerous event occurring in their lives (like crossing the Atlantic, Pilgrim-style), and lots of dramatic dialogue. Returning to these characters’ lives night after night not only helped me sculpt their stories more precisely, but it allowed me to remember exactly what happened to them 20-some years later. By the time I was 14, I was writing these plots down in an attempt to record them for later expansion. And I continued coming up with more plots and characters nightly.
As is typical, life intervened, as did my real world career of writing (far different from novelizing, let me tell you). Recently, the stories in my head have been fighting to break out. They have faces and names and extensive family trees. They dragged me to the Internet, where I developed historically accurate timelines and culled obscure art pieces that related to their lives. My imagination has begun to outgrow its mental space, and I know that I cannot put my characters lives’ off much longer.
After all, There is no better time like the present to write.
