So let's start off with a little bit about myself. I've been told that I've always had a great imagination. I had tons of Lego and K'Nex when I was young (does anybody else remember K'Nex? Those things were awesome), and I'd build little characters and have them go on adventures and stuff entirely in my head. I even came up with a bunch of recurring characters with a (for a 7-year-old) cohesive narrative, with recurring enemies and face/heel turns and all that. Again, I was young, so they probably don't make much sense in hindsight (not that I remember much about them), but they were an important part of my childhood.
But I loved writing too, if not as much as playing with Legos. I vividly remember writing a 30-page story for a second-grade writing assignment, though I couldn't tell you what it was about - it was probably along the lines of Axe Cop, though not nearly as good. And in third grade, one of my teachers got me into a creative writing workshop for a few days, where pretty much everyone else was a few years older. (God, it really just sounds like I'm bragging about myself. Believe me, I was young, and none of the stuff I wrote was any good - it was mostly the fact that I could write pages upon pages of non-cohesive stories at all that got me into that workshop.)
And of course, I loved reading. I almost always had a book on me, a habit that persisted pretty much to the end of high school. I must have read most of the sci-fi fiction section at my elementary school (it was a pretty small library, but still), and a lot of the fantasy stuff. I also was (and still am) a pretty big video game buff, though in the early days, it was mostly just Mario stuff - my first RPG was even SMRPG, and I remember writing some fairly embarrassing self-insert fanfiction for a school project once (for the record, it was me teaming up with Raphael the Raven and defeating the evil Yoshi regime that had popped up after the end of Yoshi's Island. That's all I remember about it).
And speaking of fanfiction, I used to write a lot of that too. I uploaded a few stories here and there to various archives around the net, though since this was before Fanfiction.net, all of them are probably gone. My magnum opus back then was "Luigi: The Dark Side", where Luigi snapped and took over Bowser's army and the Mushroom Kingdom. It (along with all of my other stuff) is long lost to the mists of time, but again, it wasn't any good. After I learned a bit more about fanfics (specifically the shipping and slash), that turned me off for fanfics for a good ten years, and I instead turned to original fiction.
Ten years. That just hit me as I'm writing this. It's been ten years since I started working on my first setting, a sort of fantasy/sci-fi mashup world called Shoruth. Back then, it was a generic high fantasy world with elves and wizards and all that, and the sci-fi stuff was added later, but damn. Ten years. It seems like just yesterday that I started writing up the barebones History of Shoruth document, which has survived several rewrites and now sits abandoned on my computer somewhere. It's crazy how time flies.
Anyways, I kind of lost my muse during the latter years of high school, and I didn't really do any writing of any sort until around a year ago (as of this post). Suffering from sleep deprivation, I wrote a story called "The New Life", which was an idea that had been brewing in my head for a while. It took me 9 hours to write around 10- to 12,000 words, and that was nonstop. And though I've rewritten a lot of it since then, the plot points have pretty much stayed the same.
That was what brought my spark back. Around the time I wrote The New Life is when I got back into fanfiction, especially the epically bad stuff like My Immortal or Christian Humber Reloaded. So for about the last year, I've been writing fanfics, though it's all been deliberately silly and over-the-top, nothing embarrassing (well, I am embarrassed by some of my stuff, but that's another matter). And I like to think that it was the fics, and not The New Life, that inspired me to start this blog.
And that brings us to today, March 6th 2012, according to my computer. I've been intermittently writing original stuff in between the fics (though the fics include a lot of original stuff already, some of which has made it over to this blog for more fleshing out), and here's where I'm going to post it.
So my ultimate goal here is to entertain you guys, while improving myself as a writer. I don't really have any professional training, and I know I'm not good enough to get published, so I chose to make a blog instead - that way, I can get instant feedback thanks to the power of the Internet, and I can figure out what I'm doing right and where I need to improve. I would be eternally grateful if you could offer any sort of criticism or comments in general - even something as simple as "this sucks" helps, since it keeps my rapidly-overinflating ego down.
Now, with that pointless rant over, I'm going to be posting a list of my current projects. I'll be updating this constantly, and I'll see if I can pin it to the sidebar or something. After that, it'll be on to the stories themselves! I'm really excited to see what everyone thinks, and in case you haven't written me off as a self-important braggart already, I'm actually kind of proud of my stories this time around. Again, anything you could offer is much appreciated, and I hope that I'll be able to keep at least one person entertained with my silly little stories about action sues and magical nano-golems.
-JS Zegalski
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