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I wrote my first story as a kid. It was actually for a contest at school. It was supposed to be a Halloween type story, it being October. The story came easily and in the same way all of my writing since has come—I see an image in my head, like a flash of the past, and I start writing down what I see. Sometimes the image keeps playing, like it suddenly moves from still-frame into video. I follow that through 'til it stops playing. Where the next image and length of video will pick up again I never know, but it's always illuminating when it does. That little Halloween story met an infamous end as I was accused of plagiarizing it and it was thrown out of the contest, but a few years later (I was fourteen to be exact), I bought my first pen, a ream of college-ruled paper, and began to write down memories stirred to the surface by the occurrence of a couple of consecutive dreams—one year apart to the night of each other. It took another two years before my mom found out what I was doing all those days and nights alone in my room and another year after that before I was brave enough to tell a bagboy I had a crush on that I was a writer. He was the first one to draw me out on it, telling me: If you're going to be it, you've got to say it. I Am, I've found, is a very powerful statement. So, Merehr. I began writing Merehr at age sixteen. It was simple, really. I had a vision of a man (one of those still-frames). He was tall with very long black hair, standing beneath a withering tree—it was a fall season and only a few leaves remained on the tree. The impression of the man was so strong I remained in that moment for some time. I then drew back and took in the space around him. It was a breathtakingly beautiful valley—impossibly so. The remembering came fast after that and I wrote down the 'guts' of their story in a few weeks. It was a little while later that I heard about and decided to enter Merehr in a writing contest (yeah, another one). I stayed up for days trying to get it ready and then on the last night my mom actually stayed up the whole night with me, typing while I dictated. Two very tired women drove it down to the city the next day only to have it also rejected—this time for not being double-spaced. Stops and starts are blessings, however, for Merehr is now, so many years later, a much more complete and worthy retelling of their story, and though I'll always find mistakes (in the writing), I am pleased and satisfied that it is finally seeing the light of day. Nine other novels are in the works—but they give and I receive their stories when we're all ready. Everything has its own time, and now is Merehr's.
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