an insight into my history with writing -- if you're looking for current projects I'm writing, try the drop down menu :)
I’ve been writing for almost as long as I can remember. My first story was in primary school, grade four. It was called “The Rascals” and featured two sets of triplets who would repeatedly play complex pranks on their teacher, ranging from releasing frogs to building rampaging robots. It was a daringly rebellious narrative for a teacher’s pet, but I was lauded for the very act of putting it together, so I didn’t dwell on it much.
Soon afterwards, I discovered fanfiction, and the next five-odd years of my budding writing career were dedicated to a collaborative series of superhero stories I wrote with my best friend. They borrowed characters from every beloved franchise we knew of—Marvel, The Incredibles, Lord of the Rings, Ranger’s Apprentice, How To Train Your Dragon… Over time, our blatant self-inserts’ adventures grew more complex, the plot more advanced and the superpowers less omnipresent. I participated in NaNoWriMo once or twice on the side, testing the limits of fanfiction by changing a name or two. Then I moved to a different continent, and everything changed.
Well, not immediately. I spent a good amount of time being depressed at the loss of my friends, and taking it out on fanfiction of Loki’s son (spoiler alert; he was also Adrien Agreste’s lost twin (just… don’t ask)). But gradually, my pride in my work drew me towards the idea of publishing, and I knew that Marvel x Warrior Cats fanfiction wasn’t going to make paper. And so I set to work on building a new story, and morphing the characters I borrowed into something unrecognizable from its source work.
Introducing Lex London.
With a name borrowed blatantly from Lex Luthor (I didn’t know who he was at the time, I just knew it sounded nice) and an identity that was basically powerless post-Thor: Ragnarok Loki (I had a favourite, sue me), Lex was still teetering on the edge of what copyright might allow. But his story, though originating in ideas fed by existing media, rapidly became his own. As I wrote and wrote, the twists and turns of the narrative took me in directions far away from Asgardian magic, and I created something I could consider its own. Unfortunately, in losing the elements that were bound by the magical laws of copyright, I also lost a good portion of my audience. And so came the end of my Wattpad career, and the start of something new.
COVID-19. Yup.
When the pandemic hit, quarantine brought with it new opportunities. Everyone was chronically online, and I was invited to a small discord server with a budding set of roleplaying channels. Over the months that followed, the channels grew as everyone contributed their own characters to a haphazard story guided by a select few– functioning somewhat like an out of hand D&D campaign with an overworked DM. It was glorious chaos, and from that chaos came two characters I still hold to now; Jazz Watson and Melatron Mercer.
Jazz was everything I hated in characters, and ironically it made me love her. I had intended her as the most spiteful, annoying, sarcastic and suspicious woman to walk the fictional Earth. On top of that her magic was too strong to be reasonable, her bloodline unnecessarily thought-out and her story nothing more than hunger for power. And yet… over time, she changed from a shallow snake of a character into something I grew to love. Her backstory twisted and turned to make her actions seem reasonable, her actions grew more thought-out and became founded in a motive that made sense. Plus, she was easy to draw.
Melatron… what can I say about Melatron. For about a year and a half, he was my entire personality. I had been asked by the “DMs” to write a side character– some kind of robot singer Mettaton ripoff. I loved Undertale, so of course I was down. And so I began to piece together a shallow throwaway character, messing around with character designs (I was working on my application for art school too, at the time) and dramatic backstories. He was to be an ex-soldier turned robot by a tragic death in battle, who with his second shot at life had given up arms to sing instead. His biggest competitor was a siren, with all the setup for an enemies-to-lovers arc. Some drama in the server led to the entire story being flipped about five times over, until I settled on a retelling with my old best friend where instead he would be forced on a case with a gruff detective to solve a murder he had been accused of. The story still hasn’t been written out (good luck planning something with an art student and a med student on different continents) but the characters carried me through my first year of art school, and if you ask anyone in my class about Melatron, they’re sure to know who you mean. However, with all the drama that had gotten involved, I figured it was time for me to step away from roleplaying and write alone again.
Which brings us to where we are now: Rust & Revolutionaries.
I have a whole page dedicated to this story, so I won’t get to in-depth about it here. But suffice to say that it provided me with a horde of original characters who I love as though they are fragments of my soul (they are) and a world which I can expand on in a manner that feels infinite. It’s a passion project at its finest, even if sometimes finding the motivation to actually write on it is a nightmare. But hey, that’s the perks of being a writer and artist; whenever that pesky writer’s block hits, I can just doodle my characters instead.
Maybe one of these days, I’ll finish a manuscript to publish for you all to see. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what snippets & sneak peeks you find here. If you ever have any questions about my characters or stories, feel free to shoot me a message. Until then, take care!
