I’ve been writing creatively for a very long time. If you ask me how long, I would tell you that I’ve probably been writing since before I could talk (my mom would disagree though), but I digress. There’s something so fascinating about the craft, the action of putting pen to paper to create a universe from scratch, filled with characters that will live much longer than you and never die. The act of escaping your troubled reality to dive into a “custom-made” world where you call the shots, and determine the beginning, middle and ending. It’s where YOU decide whether or not the chiseled hero gets the girl, or just falls off his horse into a swamp, and instead it’s the villain that gets the victory this time. It’s sheer magic and I love every bit of it! I’ve always been ahead of my time, I can recall being homeschooled (not really but that’s a story for another day) and sat in front of a TV and I was forced to watch whatever my father wanted me to watch. In place of cartoons and Muppets, I got acquainted with Perry Mason, Lucy, Colombo and many, many Alfred Hitchcock movies. It wasn’t all bad though, just a bit awkward at school when my classmates where going on about SpongeBob, and I wanted to talk about how great I thought the direction was in Rear Window. Nobody knew what I was talking about, not even my teachers.  I didn’t care though, it was then that I wanted to learn the craft of creative writing. I soon became a student of the game, studying films and taking notes like how long this dialogue scene was, and the practice of entering a scene late and leaving it early, and what goes into developing a character that people will root for; or hate with every fiber of their being. That was true writing to me, when you can create a person from scratch, and develop him in a way that made REAL people love and/or hate them; that to me was not just a talent, but a super power.