There are times when…
I am completely crazy. Certifiable. And the worst part isn’t the being crazy, but the knowing I’m being crazy and not being able to stop myself.
Sometimes I can’t control the volume of my voice so I mutter and mumble or I nearly shout and my laughter’s too loud. Other times I find myself waking up in the middle of some big lecture on like politics or Firefly. And then there are the times when I want to hide myself away forever and if I was a billionaire I’d be an elusive one.
There’s like a dozen-dozen people all fighting for space inside my skin, and every single one of them is deathly afraid of being known. I thrive on being the outsider even as some part of me is begging not to be so desperately alone.
I realize that I could step outside my door and meet a hundred people in any of a million ways, yet I can’t seem to manage to take that step. Instead I lurk in the shadows like Batman, which is oddly fitting considering what I write.
Yes, I write about superheroes and supervillains and people with amazing abilities. It’s something that I’ve done since I started my first book way back at the dawn of time; a vampire story early in the Of Blood universe. That book was super long and traveled here and there without settling down anywhere, and was truly a masterpiece considering I was 15 when I wrote it.
You could already tell my brilliance at that time because there was only one Mary Sue, and she was a secondary character pulling a cameo. So not only did I base a character on myself, I went full on self-insert. It makes me laugh now. And the funny thing is that back then I didn’t even know that fanfiction existed.
My roots are buried deep into original fiction, and it all started with vampires, and not the ones from Buffy. Nope, I didn’t even start watching Buffy until 2000, then I became a SUPER FAN. Before that, though, I was already fascinated with vampires, starting with the first time I read “The Silver Kiss.” It’s why all my vampires have white-blond hair; I actually wrote that into my canon.
Then there was L.J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries and NightWorld books; I devoured those by the dozen as a moody teenager. My then-friend Michelle tried to get me into pre-porn Anita Blake, but I was totally into young adult books at the time — stuff like Christopher Pike, Andre Norton, Patricia Wrede, Gordon Korman — and I was like “Nope.”
I read all the early-Anne Rice books (right up until they got too outside my interest) and I tried Charlaine Harris, but they didn’t hold me for too long. My vampire love took me to Lord Byron as a vampire and Jonathan Barret, then went even further to hit up sci-fi’s C.S. Friedman and her “The Madness Season.” Of course I also managed to read about Terry Pratchett’s version of Discworld vampires, which made me kick my feet with delight before I read “They Thirst” by Robert R. McCammon (who also wrote “Swan Song,” “The Wolf’s Hour,” and “Stinger.”)
And somewhere during all the reading about vampires, I started writing about them too. Stories of hating immortality but being afraid to die, a man forever trapped in the body of a young boy, and plenty of werewolves and wereleopards and elves. It got to the point where I had written so much into Lianndra that it’s become impossible to work with. It lives in a box now, my beloved headache. My first completed novel.
I’m proud that I wrote that first novel, jumped that first hoop, finished that first story because I’ve never stopped. I’ve written and written and poured out all these different messages that have been building up in my brain, and my books are my panacea.
Writing frees me from the crazy, but the crazy drives the writing. So sometimes I am completely crazy.
