The Universe of My Mind

I’ve always lived inside of my head for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my favorite days were those spent with a stack of comic books (which I read over and over) or parked in front of the television on Saturday afternoons to watch Creature Double Feature.

The movies and the stories I read both scared and excited me. So much so that I wrote my own. My stories were populated with the characters I read about. That became my passion. Telling stories. Even if there was nobody interested in reading them. I sought meaning in everything I encountered — be it song lyrics, poetry, or the lines uttered by a villain in a book.

To understand what I read, I kept a dictionary by my side. Everything I learned about life started within the pages of comics and books. I’m sure it’s why I had a tough time connecting with actual people in school. They didn’t talk like the characters in the stories I encountered. I had a hard time differentiating between the good guys and the bad guys. In comics and books, it was pretty obvious which side a character fell on.

And then I discovered audio drama in old vinyl records. Shows like The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, and Sherlock Holmes. In audio, the canvas was my mind. The writer, voice artists, and sound effects people helped me paint pictures on that canvas. Sometimes the images were horrific, and other times beautiful. It would be years before I created my own stories in audio. What I’ve realized in doing so is every character inhabits a shared universe. It makes sense when I think about it. How can they not? Their universe is contained within the boundaries of my mind. This is why you will see Bryar Lanereferenced in Pixie, The Devil’s Daughter, and The Behemoth, in almost everything I do. I am currently focused on a graphic novel, and it too is set in the same universe inhabited by Tammy Tracer, Waine the Bat, Fiona Potts, and Zoey from Is There Anybody Out There?.

I’m grateful for my characters. I learn just as much from them as they hopefully do from me. The characters in my worlds are all awkward, shy, and sometimes lonely. I feel right at home with them.