Unexpected Beginnings ...

I sit at the bridge of one of the campuses for a nationally-based flight school, for whom I have spent a few thousand hours teaching people how to fly airplanes. Fast-forward fourteen entertaining years later, and life now finds me spending the majority of my time at the school director’s desk, managing people and pushing paper. While I still enjoy what I do, I do spend a little time each day just dreaming about a life of adventure and of a fantastical nature. That’s kind of where my writing story begins … Not sure why, but I’ve always been intrigued by vocabulary and have forever enjoyed English; it was one of my favorite subjects in school and I still get excited when I learn new words. Writing assignments and essays have always been an entertainment for me and striving for intelligent, yet witty compositions has been a fun challenge for as long as I can remember. I often specifically look back favorably on my junior year of high school where we were all required to write sentences making use of our new vocabulary words for the week. My teacher was always amused when I would come up with crazy and outlandish examples – quite out there – that were filled with abnormal detail, wit and intellectual humor. I guess I didn’t realize it at the time, but I enjoyed writing. That revelation surprised me because – to be frankly and detrimentally honest – I’ve never thought of myself as a huge reader. Now, I’m not saying I abhor reading – I’ve enjoyed the Hobbit, LOTR, the Harry Potters, some of the Old English classics … for whatever reason, the Andromeda Strain … but the thought of sitting down and just reading a book really did not appeal to me. What did appeal to me was sitting down with a drink or a cigarette – maybe a cigar – putting on a good dramatic movie soundtrack (The Hunt for Red October was always a favorite) and just letting my mind wander. I don’t know if many consider day-dreaming an actual hobby or pastime, but I was an Olympian at it! My favorite ones were those that combined recent happenings or very realistic scenarios that I might experience on a regular basis with an element of the fantastic and supernatural. I would honestly sit there for hours, relaxing, concocting and smiling at nothing, just what was in my head. (One of my recurring favorites featured me going to dinner for business and while there, a group of Dark Jedi would show up. Well, being one of the only remaining good Jedi, along with an elderly and wise co-worker, we would need to excuse ourselves, unleash our lightsabers and do battle. Sometimes the story would take place in a force-tolerant world, other times the act of revealing ourselves would cause problems, but they were always somewhat similar, and when out on some of the more boring business dinners, they made the experience humorous, although nobody else knew exactly why.) It wasn’t until I got the idea of organizing so many of these small snippets into one common story – and gave it the background of the battles and rule of the Council of Enoch – that writing them into a format that I could share with others even became an idea. As a result, many of the occurrences you will read in the Elex Vains series can be traced back to these times … to very specific and detailed happenings that had been mulled over in mind several times. Of course, I could tell you which ones, but 1) you might get freaked out by the direction my brain can easily go and 2) if I did tell you, then I’d have to kill you.