My Writing Journey

I have always liked watching movies and shows because I hated reading even to this day. This is ironic because now here I am writing stories that I hope one day become shows and movies. So how did I get into writing and what inspires my stories? Funny enough the answer lies in a church camp of all places.

The camp was Blue Lake (or something like that, I forgot) and there was an RPG thing there. One of my friends (who I now consider my best friend) also signed up because he was a huge DND nerd and thought it would be similar to it. So we get and we're in this room with several other people from other churches who played DND and/or played RPG games, and there was me who just thought we were doing an escape room thing. Boy was I wrong because the next thing I knew we were given tiny character cards and d6 dice which were the only things we used to determine if our actions worked or not. The adventure began and typical adventuring shenanigans. I don't remember much except for some of the characters like a tiny fairy with a rose chainsaw, a giant black lion, an exploding turtle, and my best friend was a chicken mage. I was a cannibalistic half-orc thing from Lord of the Rings. I also remember the final battle where the group had to fight an evil magical centaur who had shadow-goop things as his minions. I attempted to fight the goop monsters while everyone was fighting the centaur until he died by a swarm of chickens by my best friend. Then we went our separate ways. The seed for DND and storytelling were thrown, but not sown.

Roughly a year later I returned as well as most of the party from the year before. There were a couple of new faces, characters, and adventures. Most of it was set in a prison where we had to break out using all kinds of strategies. Again I don't remember much but I do know we break out and walk through a cave and on a rock bridge. I then casually said something like "Man, I just want to kill things" and the DM said something along the lines of "Just as you say that giant winged spiders come up and surround all of you." I remember this mostly because of how the DM took something I said and came up with a mini-fight encounter right then and there. And the reaction from everyone else was in sheer terror at the thought of another fight. After the fight, I don't remember what happened next but again I remember the finale where we fought a weird slug monster thing that was weak to sunlight. My character (if I remember correctly) sort of sacrificed himself by having the monster try to take over his mind or something like that as people tried to remove drapes and expose the sun.

Now between these two adventures, I listened to songs from The Afters which mentally helped create a monster. At first, I viewed him as just that a monster who needed to be defeated. Until one day when I realized I could use this monster to fight sinful thoughts. This realization, this idea single-handedly helped spark the war with lust that I am still fighting today.

So what does all this have to do with me becoming a writer? Well, by participating in those adventures I got into DND which was where I got a ton of ideas for the world of Kolora, it's also what sparked the idea for my Dice Changers series. And that monster? He eventually became a character in Kolora with the name Sombres, the Monster of God. However, there is another side to this story. The religious side.

I am not the most religious Christian, however my dad is a huge Bible nerd and taught me a lot. My family also goes to Mars Hill where we get our minds blown up by the theology and connection between the Old and New Testaments. And if you read most of my stories this might explain a lot of the character decisions. On top of all that, there are a lot of DND stereotype jokes that make fun of religious trauma or talk down about religion. Also, the fact that there weren't a lot of cool takes on concepts on the class stereotypes of race. Like now I hate fantasy worlds where humans are the main characters (which is why half-orcs are my go-to main characters), I now have dwarves and half-orcs be best buds rather than mortal enemies, I have my own take on ghosts, I have fricken radical gay mermaids (trust me, it's NOT what you think.), and that's not even taking into account my character concepts which are all over the place from the socially awkward Kamos to the green-skinned ripoff Thrawn that is Noone, to the undead therapist Lichstien. Then you have the Satanic Panic among other Christians thinking that rolling dice with friends is somehow pagan or demonic. These things made me realize I could bridge the gap between these two groups because am part of both of these worlds, I speak their language and empathize with both cultures. Not to mention the amount of good Christian songs that don't have music videos, or if they do the videos don't do the song true justice always made me frustrated and still does to this day. In fact, artists like Skillet and Matthew Parker are my main inspirations for the structure and plots of my stories.

Now what truly solidifies all of this is, is how my parents have told me that I'm better at expressing myself through writing, and sometimes as I watch videos about worldbuilding or writing stories and I reflect on my stories I realize just how I've naturally written around certain pitfalls, or made sure plot holes were kept at a minimum. Sometimes I reflect on some of my stories and try to see how deep certain scenes can get and thus go down rabbit holes I didn't even intend to create. So here I am writing stories about a fictional world even though little me would never have imagined his older self doing. Especially while in college of all places.