A Whale Happened

When you tell people you’re an author, one of the first things people ask after getting past all the questions about your book seems to be, “So what made you want to write a book?” I figure, since this is my very first blog post I’ll go ahead and answer that. 

I’m enamored with stories. Storytelling is probably the oldest art form known to humanity. It gave birth to the visual arts and even music. Storytelling was how we passed on information, life lessons, and history before we even had written languages. Humanity built itself on stories.

Stories permeate our world, we surround ourselves with them, sometimes unwittingly. Everything you own has a story, from your favorite tchotchke to the salt and pepper shakers. Perhaps not every story is worth sharing, but many are. 

I discovered my love for storytelling as a kid. From a young age, I’d make up stories about everything. I did it so often that the adults became worried I was becoming a compulsive liar. 

I think my moment of realization was an ordinary weekday after coming home from grade school. I was perhaps ten or eleven years old. My mother was working on painting one of her plastercraft animals on her table in our living room.

“How was school?” She asked.

“Fine, I guess.” I plunked down on the floor next to her, watching her paint. “The school didn’t get those new computers yet. They said the shipment got delayed.”

Now this was the early ’90s, so individual computers at school were kind of a new thing. To a kid who thought Nintendo was the greatest thing since sliced bread, I was excited for them, so I’d been chattering about it since they’d announced it at the beginning of the school year. 

“Oh, I wonder what happened,” My mother said, not expecting an answer. 

But my brain has always insisted that I must have an answer for any question asked. Perhaps that’s what got me on this storytelling track. 

“The ship hit a whale.”

“What?” Maybe it was just the sheer outlandish nature of the statement, but suddenly my mother was paying me her full attention. Crap. I’d lied. I was going to get in trouble if she didn’t believe me. So I dug deeper. 

“Yeah, The ship that was bringing the computers. Their sonar broke down so they couldn’t see the whale. There was a big hole in the ship.” 

To my ten-year-old brain, it was a shipment of computers, therefore it must be arriving by ship. And obviously, something had to happen to that ship… so… whale. A whale happened, smashed into the side of the fictional vessel, and thousands of brand-new school computers poured out, sinking to the bottom of the ocean. 

Naturally, my mother knew this was complete and utter bullshit. As an adult, she knew how ships, whales, and school supplies worked. 

She laughed. “You just made that up.” 

And perhaps for the first time in my life, I realized that I wasn’t going to get in trouble for making up this wild fantasy. I could admit it. 

I laughed too. “Yeah, I did. I don’t know why the computers didn’t come. I don’t know why I made that up.” 

She just smiled. “Because you’re creative. You just need to be creative in the right places. Like those Ninja turtle characters you're always drawing, you could draw a story about them.” 

“Like a comic book?”

“Sure.”

Over the next several years I wrote and drew Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics featuring characters I made up. I would photocopy them and give them to my family as Christmas presents. 

As I got older, I started making comic books about my own characters in their own universes. Then I discovered animation and film-making and my attention diverted to those pursuits. Since I did poorly in school due to having ADHD during a time when they really didn’t know how to handle that, I joined the Navy to learn photography and get my foot in the film-making door.

Turns out the Navy isn’t a great environment for an ADHD brain either. I was a crap sailor. Got into lots of trouble. Thankfully I still managed to end my enlistment with a fully honorable discharge. 

And all the while I was writing. In my teenage years, a book about my friends and I with superpowers. It was pretty much a male power fantasy. Then I later tried my hand at Urban fantasy action/adventure. That, too, turned into a male power fantasy, but it had promise. I might give that another go-round one day. 

But then The Case of the Cheap Suit Plot came along, and Chloe Stewart was born. And that’s where I am today. 

But it was that moment, talking to my mom, that I think I realized I wasn’t a liar. I was a storyteller. That it was okay for me to tell stories, I just had to make sure other people understood that.

Regardless of my success or failure as an author, telling stories is my passion, and I think I’ll be doing it for the rest of my life in one form or another. I can’t imagine doing anything else.