It all started at the age of five...

My father must have noticed me sitting around bored out of my mind one Saturday afternoon in 1971, and asked me if I wanted to watch a movie called Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster.  I had no idea who Godzilla was, but the prospect of some kind of sea monster definitely piqued my interest, so I was all in... and did not regret taking the dive one bit.  Dopey English dubbing aside, I was glued to that TV screen like a Siamese twin from start to finish, even for the commercials.  My imagination was awakened like a sleeping dragon that afternoon, and it's only grown hungrier since.

Later that same night, my father asked me if I wanted to see Frankenstein (yes, the original from 1931).  I asked if it was anything like Godzilla, and he told me that Frankenstein was a human-sized man-monster.   Sounded interesting enough, so that night, I was introduced to the old Creature Features show that used to air on Saturday night in Chicago from the mid-60s to the mid- 70s on WGN Channel 9, and that cemented my stay in the deep end of the horror pool.   I knew then that if I couldn't be a monster and scare people, I'd have to learn to draw or write about them.  I did try drawing for a couple years, and realized I couldn't draw anything more sophisticated than Fred Flintstone and Dino; but with writing, anything I could imagine made it to the written page--so that turned out to be the real sweet spot.

I started writing horror stories that mimicked one of my favorite horror series as a kid: KOLCHAK, THE NIGHT STALKER.  Brilliantly portrayed by the late Darrin McGavin, Kolchak was an investigative reporter covering grisly murders all around Chicago that were the result of attacks by supernatural creatures or entities. The stories I wrote focused on a high school teen who wrote for his school newspaper, covering murders on Chicago's south side usually caused by monsters, demons, or just demented serial killers.  My character called himself The Dark Angel.  I wrote these stories from my sophomore year of high school until about halfway through my freshman year of college, where I finally abandoned the Dark Angel series and started writing a wider variety of stand-alone horror stories that I soon began to submit for publication (and that's how I grew my rejection collection--more on that in a future post!).  I still have my Dark Angel stories, and every blue moon, I glance back through them.  I had no real command of the language back then; my sentence structure was awkward, my character dialogue very cliched, but I still marvel at the sheer volume of work I was generating.  The ideas just wouldn't stop coming.