Hail and well met, my fine companions! It is I, Jessica, the mistress of musings. I’ve returned once more to weave together words as threads of a tale. Take up your mugs, let the firelight dance upon your faces, and lend me your ears! Tonight I shall spin a tapestry of myself, a tale wrought from my truth. Together we shall wander through the corridors of identity, where every jest and whisper tells a piece of who I am!
Ok, that was a bit over the top, but it certainly was enjoyable to write. Yes, as the title says, I am creative. You probably didn’t need that bardic proclamation at the start of this entry to realize that. I believe that my previous entries demonstrated sufficient creativity to show that I am a creative woman.
But wait! My last post was all about being logical. How can logic and creativity coexist in the same person? Wouldn’t one cancel out the other? I admit that it has been something I’ve wondered about countless times over the years, but in reality, at least for me, they coexist in equal measure. Sometimes, the logic side might be stronger; other times, it might be the creative side. In the end, both are core parts of my reality, just as much as every other aspect I’ve shared over the past several days.
As mentioned previously, I started reading at a very young age. My parents got me different books to read. It was a mail-order club, if I recall correctly, and I couldn’t wait to receive the new children’s books when they arrived. Richard Scarry, The Berenstain Bears, and Dr. Seuss, to name a few. They were the first things to unlock my imagination and send my mind into the realms of fantasy. I still have the Sam Books from my kindergarten years. I’m not sure what happened to the other books; if my parents still have them, if they got rid of them, or if they gave them to my niece. Little Jessica would love to reread them. I can feel her excitement bubbling forth at the memory.
My reading did not end there. My imagination was fueled by reading again in high school and beyond, particularly in the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and thrillers. I even read Steven King’s The Stand. That was an intense and lengthy read. Despite the variety, my preferred genre to read then, as it is today, has always been high fantasy. Surprisingly, though, I never actually made it through The Lord of the Rings, not even halfway through the first book.
My imagination and interest in fantasy continued to grow over the years. Early video games I played, like Zork, were text-based adventures, where I imagined the worlds being described. It was through playing Zork that my lifelong passion for programming was sparked, as mentioned in my previous entry. In computers, my imagination was expressed through ideas that I developed into rudimentary applications. There were many unfinished ideas over the years, from my first programs in the 80s through today. Without the imagination that inspired me to write code and learn what was possible, I would not have a career in programming today.
Programming wasn’t the only interest that was born from my love of computers. When I joined Second Life, a whole new area of creativity opened up to me. First, I was a virtual Barbie doll that I could dress up. I would learn how to modify my avatar’s shape, buy hairstyles, purchase clothing, and put it all together to reflect the woman I am. Granted, it was an exaggerated fantasy version, but it was the way I could express my identity before Jessica was finally given a name. Aside from dress-up, I would buy items to decorate my homes. I would learn to build homes of my own. I learned Blender to create mesh objects and bring them into Second Life to use or sell. A branch of programming, utilizing the scripting language known as the Linden Scripting Language (LSL), was used to create scripts that perform actions in the virtual world. My most popular item is a calendar system that I created and scripted, allowing people to give away or sell their own custom calendars in Second Life. There was also photography, where I would set up pose stands to pose the avatar or avatars as I wanted and take pictures, which would then be brought into GIMP for post-processing.
Then there was the website design. I would create full web pages for myself and others. I would manage to create my own images to enhance the look. I even made themes for my WordPress and phpBB installations. Nothing was ever considered professional-grade, but it was something I started in the late 90s, and I still manage to do today.
Outside of the digital ones and zeroes, I expressed my creativity in many other ways. In my school years, I used to take Thomas Guide maps and trace my fingers along the highways and streets. I would pretend I was a freedom fighter, and Orange County and San Bernardino counties were at war with Riverside County and Los Angeles County. Because I lived in San Bernardino County, I was a hero, and I had to find ways to get to Orange County to bring news that would save the people and bring an end to the war. Looking back, that was a pretty in-depth level of creativity for someone still in grade school and middle school. Because of this map knowledge, my parents also came to rely on me as a navigator, as I could read maps so easily.
Expanding upon that idea in middle school and high school, I would take all my board games and place the boards together between my room and my brother’s room. These boards became a new world, and each game board represented a different part of that world. I would use action figures and move them between the different boards in the world. Each board had its own series of traps that I invented, and I had to get the action figures from the first game board to the last to escape safely.
Playing with Barbie alongside my cousin and engaging in action figure play at home were other frequent sources of imagination, as is common for many children. More important to me than the action figures, though, were my stuffed animals, and I had many of them. My favorite was a monkey puppet that I would often talk to and play with. Looking back, I think the monkey was one of the first outlets of Little Jessica, where the monkey was speaking with her voice, and I was playing back with her that way. Ok, ok. Yeah, it could have been just a child playing. I’ll grant you that. But in my heart, as I get to understand Little Jessica more, I believe it was her coming out to play.
Legos. Legos. Legos. Oh, how I loved the Legos. I spent days in my room or on the patio in the backyard playing with Legos. I didn’t follow the directions to build the Lego model as intended. No. It was all a product of my imagination and creativity. I built entire cities. Small space ships. I would build anything my mind could dream up and play with it. Only to tear it all apart at the end of the day and put it away to see what my imagination would bring the next time I brought the Legos out.
Along comes the pièce de résistance. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D). I remember being with my parents inside a Toys-R-Us, you know, the place where a kid can be a kid. We were browsing a game aisle when I was around eight years old, and I saw a game called Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), featuring a man fighting a dragon on the cover. I just had to have the game, so I begged my parents to get it, even though it was meant for ages ten and up. Well, it proved to be too complicated for my parents, and I never really got to experience it at that time. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that someone from school introduced me to the game and taught me how to play. Armed with a little knowledge, I retrieved the game from my parents and began learning how to play, allowing my imagination to run wild. It was shortly after that when another friend told me the real game was called AD&D, and I wasn’t considered a real participant in the game until I played that version. So, of course, I had to learn that one instead of D&D.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I became heavily involved in AD&D, running campaigns with a core group of friends. From 1990 through 1995, I was heavily involved in creating worlds, adventures, and characters. My imagination was running wild. My favorite character, as mentioned in an earlier entry, was a female weretiger. She was a hunter from a tribe similar to the Amazons. Through the course of her adventuring, she was taken from her homeworld to another fantasy world, and the remaining time of her adventures was spent struggling for survival in a new world and trying to find a way back home. She was a warrior, a thief, and a sorceress. She was a force to be reckoned with and a dangerous foe when crossed. She wasn’t evil. She helped people. However, her main concern was gaining power so she could return home. I identified with her on many levels, which years later I linked to both my female identity and my furry identity.
The final piece of creativity to touch on here is my writing. If it wasn’t already obvious, I love to write. My entries here can be quite verbose. Offline, I tend to be quiet and reserved. I’ll speak when spoken to and respond politely, but I prefer my solitude. Writing, however, allows me to stretch my creative and imaginative muscles in ways that inspire me and, I hope, others. While I may not always feel comfortable in a group setting, I can relate better one-on-one. Additionally, I can express myself more effectively in writing.
I remember writing something in sixth grade that I was pretty proud of. All I remember about it now is that it was some kind of science fiction. I think I named it ‘Space: The Final Frontier,’ unaware that I had taken that from Star Trek. Then in the eighth grade, I took an art class and a creative writing class. I didn’t excel in art, but I excelled in creative writing. Irony was, I didn’t even want to be in the class. I thought I hated the writing. When I was placed in Advanced Placement (AP) English in ninth grade, I was surprised. I didn’t think I was that good in English. In that class, I had to write poetry, and again did very well at it, but I hated every moment of it.
Everything changed in the tenth grade. I had a teacher in my AP English class who inspired me in my writing. She would create these small scenarios, such as “have a tragic event happen to your character,” and the students would create the scene that matched the event. Initially, I attempted to write a modern-day detective story. That turned out to be a disaster on an epic scale. I hated every moment of it, and it became increasingly difficult to write with each new scenario that was presented. I never read detective stories; I read fantasy. How could I write modern stories when my head wanted to wrap itself around magic? So, when the tragic event scenario was given, I decided to write a nuclear holocaust that turned the story from modern into post-apocalyptic fantasy. Upon finishing that scene, I realized I had gone from terrible to abysmally bad.
My next solution wasn’t driven by the enjoyment of writing, but rather to revisit the early scenarios and start over. I was going to stick with what I knew, fantasy, and write a new story from each scenario. It wasn’t because I liked to write, but because what I had previously written was so utterly, irrevocably, and terribly bad that I needed a clean slate. As I wrote within the scenarios, though, I discovered it was too constraining for me. The exercise of writing about the scenarios, while annoying to me, turned out to be the key to unlocking my passion for writing. Upon realizing how constraining it was, I went to the teacher and asked about writing without the constraints. She encouraged it, and encouraged me. So, I started my first fantasy story, not because it was an assigned project, but because I felt a passion within that I hadn’t felt before —a passion that still burns bright today.
My writing passion may have started in the tenth grade, but as mentioned, it didn’t end there. When I became heavily involved in AD&D a little over a year later, it came with it a substantial amount of writing. Character backstories, new worlds for adventures, locations, and so much more. Then there was a play-by-post role-playing forum that started from a comic book website. There, I would create more characters, more scenarios, and work collaboratively to build in-depth, constantly evolving stories. In Second Life, although the world was a three-dimensional, highly visible virtual environment, writing and imagination were still required to emote scenes and create backstories for a community that I co-created and co-owned.
Today, my love of writing continues as I’m writing my first series of books to be published. For all my previous writing, which began when my passion was sparked in tenth grade, nothing was ever finished. I would start and write myself into a corner, or I’d spend days world-building and never get a story off the ground. But four months ago, I did something I had never done before. I had completed a storyboard that provided a comprehensive narrative, from start to finish, with a solid ending. I spoke with a publisher who assisted with self-publishing, and we determined that the number of scenes I had equated to well over 200,000 words (by rough estimates), which, for a fantasy story, wasn’t uncommon, but it was decided to be too long for a single book, so we decided to split it into four books. As I searched for my logical splitting points, I determined I needed to split into five books and add a few more scenes to make the individual books roughly the same length.
As of today, I have 150 scene storyboards, which equate to 150 chapters. Book one has a first draft completely written. Then I went back and created a polished draft of each chapter, which I’ve been providing, one at a time, to my editor. Currently, my editor is about 1/3 of the way through my first book, while I’m almost 1/4 of the way through the first draft of book two. I’m excited, and I’m finding a way to balance writing with work. I’m hoping that my writing will be successful enough to become my sole source of income, but I realize that few writers actually achieve that level. So, whether my book is a best seller or just one of many in a sea of fantasy books, I’m looking forward to where my creativity takes me.
And thus, I conclude the tale for today. Through the tangled web of time, the weaving of words brought forth a colorful tapestry of creativity. See now this new aspect of me, with more tales to be told. Until the morrow, my dear companions.
I am logical. I am creative. I am Jessica.