In 1985 I started grade 7 at Queen Elizabeth School in Moncton, NB, Canada. I was 3’11” tall and 11 years old. I was small.
At that time, bullying was considered kind of normal and I got the worst of it. I spent the better part of my three years in junior high being beaten up, stuffed in garbage cans or lockers, hung on coat racks, and generally just treated like complete crap. I hated it. Although I did have some good friends and my mom was super supportive and always helped however she could at the end of the day, I hated myself.
1985 also saw the launch of Robotech, one of the first anime imports into North America, and I found myself completely immersed in that world. By the time grade 8 rolled around I had started writing Robotech stories, now called fan-fiction, but included an extra character who was essentially a super hero. I wrote story after story after story imagining what it would be like to be this character who could fly, had super-powers, and could take on anyone. It allowed me to escape from the torment I was experiencing at school.
I never realized it until much later in life how much that writing helped keep me sane. Burying myself in a story and taking this one character and making him the hero and not the one being beaten all the time felt like therapy in a weird way.
By the time high school came along, I wasn’t as short and small as I was and started to find who I really was. In grade 12, a few friends and I put out a “zine” with a bunch of silly stories and a handful of music reviews. Remember, this was the early 90’s and there was no internet. We enjoyed it so much that we kept making that zine for the next few years. Every couple of months I’d take all the stuff we wrote, type it into Word Perfect on my computer, and we would produce our little zine. A few years into it, we switched to almost entirely music related content focusing on album reviews and band interviews. By the time we stopped printing it (fall of 1997) we’d managed to get it sold across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, with a few issues here and there in Western Canada and even as far as Australia.
I spent a few years doing almost no writing of any kind but in 2001 I started my personal blog. This was long before blogging was even really a thing. WordPress hadn’t even come out yet and I was literally copying and pasting HTML code in my website to make “blog” entries. I eventually taught myself enough PHP that I made my own little blogging software and started posting stuff almost daily. I eventually moved my blog to Postnuke and then WordPress when it was finally a bit more mainstream and stable. That blog is still running today and although I don’t write on it anywhere near as often as I used to, I post to it from time to time when the feeling hits me.
In 2010 I started a geocaching website called Cache Up NB. It was meant to replace a dying geocaching community website and took off quite well. It ultimately turned into a pretty heavily visited site in the Atlantic Canada region for geocachers and even got noticed by The Amazing Race Canada. They approached me and my Cache Up NB partner to help them with a geocaching task for a season two episode of the show. That combined with our top notch work with the national parks, and a massive event we held in 2015 made my work with Cache Up NB some of my best ever. With 350+ articles under my belt on that blog, it wasn’t all ground making material, but I did pump out some very memorable work that I am very proud of even to this day.
That was also the year I experimented with self-publishing for the first time. It wasn’t about actually getting a book onto shelves or listed anywhere and more about how it all worked. At the time, I opted to try out Lulu.com to see how their services worked. One book was a compilation of all the articles we had written in our zine which I gave a copy to my two good friends for them to have. It also included a couple of new items which fell in line with the theme of the zine. The other book was a compilation of a bunch of ideas I had about spirituality and religion as I was trying to work through my own beliefs at the time and just wanted to put it all down so it made sense. Both of those books did end up listed on Amazon for a short while but I took them down because they were never vetted or proofed or anything. It was all just a basic experiment in publishing for me.
But the desire to write a real book didn’t come until after I had attended a taping of The Big Bang Theory in March of 2016. I had posted the photo you see on this page to Instagram & Facebook immediately after getting back to my car after seeing the show. A longtime friend of mine made a comment to me about how I needed to write a memoir about the “cool” things I’ve had the chance to do. I had already thought of writing down a bunch of my travel stories and my wife had suggested it as well. But for some reason my friends comment stuck with me. Later that year I started on my “Seagulls” book and finished it a year later.
But just as I had finished writing that book, I went on another adventure and when I got home, I started working on a new book.
The Caravan Chronicles was released in 2020 and and Mugged By Seagulls came out a year later. I continue to write in whatever form works for me.
Right now, most of my writing is voiceover scripts for the YouTube channel WatchMojo.