From as early as age nine, I knew I wanted to write.

I generally credit Henry Gilbert for the inspiration, though in truth he was but the first solid example I found of what I wanted to create.  That said, Gilbert's King Arthur's Knights holds a special place in my heart, and remains to this date, at four full readings, the only book I have ever re-read.

After King Arthur, my appetite for books, already incredible, became nigh insatiable.  I grew up on Redwall and Jack London, on The Edge Chronicles and The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, on reading and writing, on the beauty of language.

With middle school came essays, and while the language still intrigued and enticed me, my passion was bogged down by rigid structure and meaningless over-analyses.  Both, while helpful in their beginnings, had come to be passed down as no more than tradition for tradition's sake.  It wasn't until late into high school that I finally had an English teacher who understood this, and returned the focus to those original intentions: to write in an easy, understandable manner, and to find the author, and their world, within the one they wrote of.

Finally, we weren't trying to convince (mostly ourselves) that the curtains were blue because the author went through a period of depression.  We were explaining, point by point, fact by fact, the way an aspect of the author's environment was reflected in their writing.  We were delving into history and finding all the authors in Shakespeare's England thrown into jail for writing things disagreeable to the crown, and looking again at that travesty of a play, Pyramus and Thisbe, within A Midsummer Night's Dream, and realizing that the lion must needs be quite tame for fear of frightening the ladies, and so on, and finally coming, at the close, to Puck, the trickster fairy, who was never once serious, never once entirely truthful, now apologizing lest the audience be offended by the performance, and suggesting it was no more than a dream.

At last I understood the value of the work, and what had once been a painful, tedious chore became a source of constant joy and discovery.  I learned that essays, too, were literature, that they didn't have to be boring, that they didn't have to be plain.  I learned to love all literature, all writing.  Even the process of coming up with a topic, of deciding which specific aspect of a thing interested me, which part I wanted to know more about, what knowledge I wanted to share with the world, even that process was exciting.

At last I knew that I did not merely love reading, that I did not merely love fantasy, even that I did not merely love language, but that what I loved was above, beyond, and encompassing of all those things: what I loved was writing.

Over the years, I had collected myriad story beginnings, and now I returned to them with a renewed passion.  I did not continue or complete any of them, no, they had served their purpose, but what I did do was use them as fuel for the fire, as a clear starting point for further efforts.  I was far enough distanced that I could see what I did right and what needed work, and I took that, and I ran with it.  What follows are many of my attempts to capture in language the true beauty of that fickle temptress, Inspiration.