Who Am I? (Really)
To answer literally, I’m a 30-year old New York native/Austin transplant hoping to share my world with the rest of the world.
This has been the case ever since I was a kid drawing comic strips and writing my own SpongeBob episodes for fun. Writing was easy back then - I’d draw stick figures named after my friends and write adventures for them to go on. Getting in my own head and writing down what came out felt like puzzle pieces fitting perfectly into place. Putting pen to paper was liberating, knowing that I had control and the responsibility to make the characters real and their stories purposeful. I’m very grateful for my mom, who would edit my spelling errors and print out the chicken-scratch I’d deliver to her. The stories would then be handed out at family parties in colored binders as I signed each one (and collected a few bucks). This passion never went away as I entered early adulthood. I wrote short stories, poems, songs, and even fake diaries from the POV of fictional characters. Everything was written by hand because I had to put extra thought into each word to avoid crossing things out. I started a few novels, but a new idea always seemed to trump the previous one. A lot of notebooks were left half empty (or half full depending on how you look at it).
I began writing Living Legend as I graduated college with a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice and a concentration in Advertising.
From the above, it’s clear I didn’t know what I wanted to do after school. There was a lot of pressure to start working, but I was at a mental crossroads. I spent my mornings applying for jobs and my afternoons writing my novel. Several months later I’d completed the first draft of Living Legend and started a full-time paid internship. The following year, I leveraged my internship to get a “real” job in media/advertising in NYC and my book was about 30 pages longer. Over the next 5-6 years I focused on my career, only periodically returning to editing.
By 2021, I was finally ready to save the book with “FINAL” in the title. Then came the dreaded realization that writing the book was only half the battle. First, I contracted a Ukrainian artist to turn my doodle into the book’s cover. Next, I created this website to act as a homebase while I figured out how to publish the book. Finally, I discovered that self-publishing is actually much easier and less stressful than I imagined it would be. After reformatting for Amazon’s template, the book was submitted for their approval. The next day it was approved and the first physical copy was being printed to ship. When it finally arrived I was completely in shock. Reaching this point where I could hold a book and say that I wrote it had always been my dream. There was a moment or two that this actually frightened me. I no longer had the excuse that “It’s still a work in progress” or “That’ll be edited out.” This was it, the finished product. Reading it in it’s physical form was surreal. I think I smiled for two days straight as I read through it.
Now Living Legend is finally available, and while there’s still so much to do, for now I just need to stop and reflect on how I got here. Then I’ll decide where I’m going next.
About the Author
My “About the Author” pages have come a long way…
