Welcome to My New Home

Hello and welcome to my brand new website! I should have set this up ages ago but, as you may soon learn (unless I somehow, miraculously, manage to change my ways) I am a notorious procrastinator...

I'd like to be able to welcome you to my website by name, but at the current moment, I still don't have my own domain. Ah, the perils of the early days of setup! Hopefully, by the time you're reading this, that will no longer be the case. And if it is, I hope that three years haven't passed since the date of this writing

I'll start this out by telling you a little bit about myself. My dream of becoming a writer began when I was a mere seven years old. At least, I remember that I was in the second grade, so the math says I must have been seven. I was in the basement of my parents' house, idly sketching a masterpiece of artistic craftsmanship—as seven-year-olds are wont to do—and my mind was already at work, developing the story behind the crudely misshapen character I had devised. He was a wolf, who was also a detective, and who had abilities in the vein of Inspector Gadget. (I fear that my childhood self was not the most original of thinkers at times.) It was to be a series of books, illustrated, of course. I turned to my mother, then and there, and declared that I wanted to be a writer. Aside from a brief blip in my later high school and early university years, I've never looked back. The moral of this story is, always make your life decisions when you are seven years old. What could possibly go wrong?

Me on the first day of school, 2001, shortly before my aspiration revelation. Don't ask about the shirt. I have no idea, either.

Fast forward a few years through all of the boring stuff that I'll save for my unreadably brain-numbing memoir someday, and we arrive at my final years of high school (a.k.a. that period of necessary transition from familiarity to the stuff they've allegedly been teaching you how to handle for the past fourteen years, when in reality, they've mostly just taught you how to handle that very familiarity). It's probably understandable that I started to doubt myself. After all, how likely was it that I would ever succeed at my dream of becoming a successful writer? So many tried, so few prevailed. And, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a professional procrastinator. I'd never written a book or serious, publishing-quality short story to that point. Every book I'd tried to start had been terrible, underdeveloped before commencement, and left in a long-since unopened computer file after page twenty, if I even got that far.

I hadn't even read consistently until I was in the tenth grade. Thankfully, that changed when my class was assigned a book that I actually enjoyed. I say "actually enjoyed" because that was a rarity when it came to school-assigned readings. Prior to the tenth grade, I can only remember one mandatory reading outside of Shakespeare that I had enjoyed (The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore by Joan Lowery Nixon), and even that had only been semi-mandatory, inasmuch as it was selected from a list of permitted readings rather than being specifically assigned. There had been a few short stories that had grabbed my attention (particularly, the works of Edgar Allan Poe), but otherwise, books and I had not had a fantastic relationship up until that point.

The book in question, the one that changed my life (kind of) was the classic young adult sci-fi novel The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. At lunch, when my friends had finished eating and ran upstairs to a computer lab where one of the teachers let them play games until next period, I was left alone to wander about the (limited) school grounds. After a few days, I decided to use that solitary time to get my reading done. And I was surprised to find that I liked it. When I finished that book, I took my mother's long-given and long-ignored suggestion to read Agatha Christie, and there I discovered my new favourite writer. I read between fifteen and twenty of her books over the next two years, which might not seem like a lot to you avid readers out there, but for me it was uncharted territory. I also explored the works of Stephen King, W.P. Kinsella, Jodi Picoult, Harper Lee, and, of course, more John Wyndham.

But I've digressed for quite a while, and I've stuck in high school for a lot longer than time allowed back then. Midway through the eleventh grade I had come, slowly, to the realization that pursuing a life in the arts was too tenuous for my nerves (of which I have plenty). I'd taken a Law class for interest's sake and I was enjoying the content. Lawyer had a nice ring to it, or maybe that's just the sound of his pockets. Either way, I set course on a new life plan. Become a lawyer, put some badguys in jail for a while, make and save enough money to retire at, say, forty-five, and set about my writing career once failure would no longer have as dramatic of an effect upon my livelihood.

A great, sensible, thoroughly boring plan.

Thank God for the trials and tribulations I ran into during my first year of post-secondary school at the University of Guelph-Humber. I won't get into the details, as some of them still boil my blood and set my mind upon cruel, vindictive vengeance. And while I like to flex my creative side on that matter, the blinding fury is fruitless and self-damaging. On the whole, the school was a good and comfortable place, and I did relatively well in my classes. I also realized that, as interested as I was in the law, I had absolutely no desire to live it day-in, day-out for the next twenty-seven years. So I threw that future away and enrolled at the University of Toronto for English, with minors in Cinema Studies and History.

Apparently I didn't take that many pictures of UofT itself while I was there, and I don't feel like traipsing out there at (exactly) midnight, as I'm writing this, so this one that was taken in 2017 in King's College Circle will have to do.

If you've read my About Me page, then you've already seen the spoiler: I didn't finish my degree the way I'd intended when I started it. A quarter of the way through my first year, despite doing well in my Intro level history course, I was so bogged down with readings which, though interesting, were not interesting enough to hold my attention. Meanwhile, Intro to Cinema Studies (part of a program I hadn't realized existed prior to my application to UofT, and which I'd only taken semi-seriously as a Minor option considering that I had never been a huge fan of movies up until that point) had proven to be a very interesting and engaging course. I switched to a Double Major, and that was how I finished. Although, I did briefly consider adding a Minor in Anthropology (a field I had no knowledge of before taking a couple of very intriguing university classes about it), the scheduling just didn't line up, unfortunately.

In my first year, I wrote my first book. Inspired by The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I realized for the first time that constructing a five-hundred page tome was not necessary in the pursuit of great literature. With forty minutes to spare before my twentieth birthday, I finished it. I wrote a book while still a teenager. For some reason, it was important to me to be able to say that.

From that point on, I knew that I could complete the works I started. My second book, a collaboration with my mother, was written over the course of a week in October of 2017. The planning took much longer, but the actual writing took a week. By great contrast, my next solo effort was a three-and-a-half year long project that spanned over 480,000 words by the time of its completion. A weak horror novel with a decent concept followed, and to this day it is still desperately in need of a subplot. Then came a dystopian political/war novel which, once again, was good in theory, but needs a major reworking (it's never a good sign when, two-thirds of the way through writing, you're already planning how to gut the entire thing and rewrite it through the eyes of just one of your eight protagonists). I threw together a novella about painters, just for fun. Scattered in a few short stories, mostly horrors. But what to do with them?

In October of 2019, I decided upon my next steps, and my first into the public eye. I started my Instagram account for poetry on the 5th, having never seriously written poetry before. Sure, I'd dabbled, as all writers dabble in various styles over time. But really, truly seriously? This was new ground. I'm still learning how to use that medium to the best of my ability, and I'm a long way from figuring it out. But it's a start.

Next, my prose must make its debut. Stay tuned for more information about that. There may be an update soon...

For now, I'll be maintaining this blog and continuing to post poetry on Instagram. If there's anything you'd like to see from me, or if you have a book recommendation, shoot me a message/suggestion/scathing criticism on my Contact page!

Happy Reading!!!