4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!
So you all know that I’ve been working on Fie Eoin for years, and that it was the first book-length original fiction I ever wrote. But there is this little known book called “My Life With Pone” that predates Fie Eoin by, oh, about a decade. I wrote/illustrated the Pone book in fourth grade for a city-wide writing contest. It was about a My Little Pony named Pone (said “powne” not “ponee”) and our adventures together. It was sort of… well… it’s what you would expect from a fourth grader writing about her invisible pony friend (I will note that Pone was my invisible pony friend in first and second grade – I was way too mature to have invisible friends by fourth grade ;P ). In other words, it was crap.
I tried to write another book in middle school – about the week I spent at summer camp – and that was also crap.
I pretty much gave up trying to write in high school (I wrote some really bad poetry, though) because by that point I decided I was going to be the next great high-school-aged pop star. American Idol wasn’t around back then, so it was kind of hard to break out if you didn’t have connections to Disney (this was when Britney and Christina first appeared). Halfway through high school I discovered my love for science (I dissected a fish and it was love at first cut) and that was pretty much it for writing for a while. While I continued to read like a mad-woman, I didn’t re-discover my love of writing until halfway through college, when I also re-discovered My Little Pony.
You see, Ebay is an amazing (and dangerous) thing. I was searching for a movie for my boyfriend at the time (now my husband) that he used to watch as a kid. So while perusing children’s videos I came across the My Little Pony movie. I immediately thought of Pone. I searched all over the web for her, having thoroughly forgotten what she looked like. While searching for Pone, I found something called Dream Valley SIM – a role-playing MLP game. I was a bored college student with a long-distance boyfriend and a large procrastination drive so I joined and wasted away my nights writing once again about Pone and her adventures. I had so much fun that I joined a few more of these writing-based role-playing games, honing my writing skills (which were pathetic) while I wasted away the hours. I went from MLP to X-men (I played Monet and Rogue, as well as some original characters) before I finally discovered Fie Eoin.
Of course, you’re never going to see any of those stories.