My true start in horror was at age 5. I fell in love with all the old black-and-white movies; Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Boris Karloff was my favorite actor. Then I got into other movies and spinoffs. I couldn’t wait for Friday nights when Project Terror would come on and give a great horror movie. Now my love for writing came from my Freshman Highschool English Teacher Mr. Ash. He assigned the class to write a short story between 2k and 5k words. he had everybody revise them and let them turn them in except me.
By my fourth revision, he still wouldn’t accept my work and had me revise it again. I got mad and told him no I am not going to do it. I told him that he let everyone else turn theirs in and it wasn’t fair to not take mine as well. He took me out into the hall and asked you want to know why I push you so hard? Because I see something in you that I don’t see in anyone else in that class and I be damned if I am going to let that gift go to waste. I revised that short story eight times before he accepted it. He even created a whole new curriculum just for me alone. While everyone else simply did their regular English work, I wrote all year. He still worked with me and gave me assignments even though I was no longer in his class while in other English classes.
After Graduation, Mr. Ash approached me and told me that he was teaching both sessions of summer school this year and I was more than welcome to sit in on them and I did. Of course, all I did was write while everyone else did their regular boring work. I didn’t get back into writing until about 25 and then off and on. I was serious about writing in my early 30’s part-time while working. But when I became permanently disabled in 2016 I went into it full-time and have been writing ever since.