You hear people talking about humble beginnings all the time, but it feels so weird to be confronted with it yourself.
Yes, at 23, I still resist cleaning my room. You could still see the floor, it wasn’t really dirty yet, right? But I dove in, and started cleaning, and found this.
Doesn’t look like much, true enough. But fifteen-year-old me wrote and drew this. I remember how carefully I made those lines, thinking how amazing it looked. I remember how cramped my hand felt, writing so small. I wrote this in Algebra 3-4 when I was supposed to be taking notes, see, and I didn’t want my table partner (one of those Cool Kids that knew she was cool but didn’t care, which made her even Cooler) to see that I was writing and drawing instead of taking notes.
I made Izzy to be a counterpoint to my friend Lizzy’s character Kira - two original characters made to be flung into different worlds at our choosing, standing in for our own dynamic duo-ness. I’d never made a character before. I’d never been that creative before.
(Yes, Izzy has a pass to Funky Town. I was fifteen. It was 2009. Sue me.)
And she’s been there, over the years. Her story’s always been in my mind’s eye, ready and willing to be told, and it wasn’t until I got into my Master’s program that I was finally able to get it down.
I hid this stuff away back when I was eighteen, both out of sheer embarrassment - I mean, that art. holy cow - and the extreme fear that someone like my mother would find it and question it. Which is odd, now, since I wrote her whole story down and I’m in the works of editing it to publish. Why be afraid to show it off if I’m putting it out there for the world to see?
But the point I’m making here is that hold on to your weird characters. Your funky ideas. Even if you’re young. Because you don’t know where it’s going to take you. You don’t know how far you can run with it until you scoop the damn lil thing up and sprint for your life, y’know?
