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Even now, after years and years passing me by, I can still remember evenings at my grandmother’s house. It was a small place. A single story, two or three bedroom home. But in spite of this, there were always times where the whole family would pack into that little house and have no end of fun and joy. Even better though were the times I was asked to stay over for the night. Granny would read to me before bed. A small little story book called ‘Miss Suzy’.

I believe that these sessions of storytelling were when my desire to write began to set in, though I never really tried to make anything until years later. I had developed a deep love for reading, especially fiction. There was something about the tales people spun, the places they took me. It was during my eighth year of school that I attempted my first original work.

The draft of this has, I’m very sure, been lost during the many moves and computer replacements that come from the passing of time. I often think back on it and wonder what I could do with it given the opportunity. I was young, and didn’t know at all what I was doing. I remember writing all of  that by hand in a standard composition book. I remember getting my first truly good ink pen, and how quickly the draft grew to two, then three notebooks in length. It was then that I decided to try and type it up.

Now, computers are wonderful tools, and I appreciate what they have allowed the common person to do. I honestly don’t think I would be able to survive with my anxiety ridden self if the things I used my PC for were only done the old fashioned way. But I learned something very quickly while writing. Computers are utterly stifling when used for creative writing.

That blinking cursor was a herald of my lack of progress. The red and blue lines of the spelling and grammar checking tools took away my accountability for my work. And oddly, in equal measure made me feel as though all I had done was put down glaring mistakes. How could I call myself a writer and have done these things? I ended up spending most of my time undoing my work before I had even finished whatever thought was needed next.

I had stalled in my work. High school was in full swing for me, and though I kept working with pen and notebook. I didn’t get very much done until something changed in my senior year. A family friend saw the struggling I dealt with, and gave me a tool that ended up changing the whole way I approached writing. My very first typewriter.

In fact, I still own this machine. It has served me well, though has been retired in favor of a handful of other, more smooth working typers. I began working in a flurry. Now, at the time of launching this site, my most lengthy work is sitting somewhere between 80 and 90 installments. A few times, readers of my work have asked me in different ways why I choose to work in such an outdated way. Does not typing manually create more work? Do I type the stories twice? Once manually, and then again on a computer to digitize it? Well, getting back to my earlier thought of not being able to get by without a computer, the answer to this problem lay with modern software.

I discovered after quite a lot of tedious work that something called ‘Optical Character Recognition’ existed, and was made for the purpose of transferring documents from physical media to a digital media.

I tried using my phone’s camera at first and an app that promised to do exactly that. However, the low quality of the camera in my simple phone, combined with a free program that was nowhere near sensitive enough to capture the somewhat inconsistent ink coverage an antique machine can produce left the results a jumbled mass of indecipherable gibberish.

I almost gave up the cause. I was so frustrated, and it seemed like I faced an obstacle at each turn. But I found a program called TopOCR. It was a bit pricey compared to some alternatives. (And had I been patient, I could have used Google lens when I upgraded to a better phone.) But since my purchase, there has been no technical handicap that has gotten in my way.

So I typed and scanned. I edited and reformatted. I produced in amounts I had never thought possible for myself. I’ve also found myself finding more excuses and time to write in. I’ve been known to spend some of my breaks at work annoying my coworkers with the cacophony of the type slugs. For every installment I posted on my Facebook groups, I would get the next chapter, or even more work done in time to find myself churning out product faster than I was sharing it. It was and is what any creative mind wants to see. Not only an improvement in quality, but in the volume of my work.

And now I find myself wanting a consolidated place to share my works. I never thought before that I would ever be one to make a website, I normally leave that level of complex work to people who are better at it. However, it seemed the best answer to my needs. I love writing, and have never questioned why I do it. I always thought it was simply an outlet for the sorts of things I could never do in my own life. A doorway to places I could never go. 

But if I can share these adventures, take others to the lands and skies that take form in my mind, would it not be cruel to hide these things from others? So I welcome you, who have found your way here. These are my gifts to you. I hope that through my words, you can feel things. Touch, smell, and taste worlds that bring you joy, sorrow, fear, and new perspective. I hope you enjoy these works of fiction as much as I have enjoyed creating them for you.