One cannot be fully realized without the other. Reading any gorgeously spun work of fiction, with its poignant display of finely-fit letters and sentences will tell you that it's all in the technique. It's the sweet sputter of poetry between its lines, where both joy and terror are eviscerated, that carries with it the ability to envelop the helpless yet willing captive of its pages. Ah yes, but what is it to be a writer? Succombing to the inescapable lust for preserving thoughts in time with ease and grace, romancing the language, all the while committing your deepest and darkest thoughts to paper. This is what is to be a writer.

What was my first exigence? What was the first experience and/or event that inspired me to write? Was it something political, personal, or artistic in nature? Ever since I was very young writing has been one of my favorite pastimes. My first book, entitled The Magic Sword and an incredible 50 wide-ruled pages long, was entirely inspired by music. My brother, 4 years older than me, always loved orchestral film music. I had my favorites, adding these heart-stopping scenes of adventure in my head. I imagined what the characters would be doing during each bar and measure before writing it down. Then I filled in the blanks. This line of thinking must have derived from my love of film.

In junior high I commuted to school (about 40 minutes from home) with a few other kids. I created characters for each of my friends and wrote fictional stories which I would read during the commute. The stories involved other kids from school, teachers, and often were accounts of actual incidents dressed up in fantasy or science fiction scenarios. They got a kick out of hearing them. I got a kick out of writing them. Perhaps I had this desire to change my world, converting the ordinary and mundane events around me into something else, stories worth telling. (And p.s. - I loved to read 'choose your own adventure' books as a kid.) I’ve kept a few of those running junior high serials (they must be in my closet somewhere).

Later I began to write treatments for fictional shows. A big inspiration was the first season of the night time serial Wiseguy. Somewhere along the way I got into writing short horror stories, big influences being Edgar Allan Poe and W.W. Jacobs.

Speculative fiction is where my passion now lies. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 remains a favorite. One of my first memorable science projects in school was one in which I was to imagine a vision of the future. I was to illustrate and construct a Martian colony to be inhabited by humans, taking into account gravity, atmospheric composition, and the planet's flora and fauna. Needless to say I jumped right on this one. The project caught my imagination and pushed me into the realm of science fiction. I wished to create a realistic future, my predictions based on the extrapolation of current truths. Becoming obsessed with the future in a 'real world' context, I gravitated toward books such as Cowley's Spacebase 2000.