Pre-Author

ong before I ever considered graphic design, in fact long before I even considered being an author… there was something I wanted to be, just as much, maybe even more… an architect.

Probably from the time that I was four years old, maybe even younger I remember that I would lie in my bed at night, tracing the angles of the ceiling with my eyes, over and over again… I have always had a special place in my heart for designing buildings and architecture, in fact long before I’d ever purchased books on writing I bought my first book about being your own architect. I tried to understand the ins and outs of designing a house (or really any building), I even had special software that allowed you to make up your own blueprints and render them in 3D. For Christmas when I was about eleven my aunt bought me an architects desk, she had had a friend who worked in architecture (or engineering I can’t remember which) and within one holiday I had special architects stencils, and a t-straight, special rulers and pencils and everything any aspiring architect could ever hope for. The only thing I was missing was the math skills. I have forever been horrible at math. Geometry (easily the cornerstone of architecture) was one of my worst subjects in high school (though to be fair I had taken it before Algebra as I was under the impression from the teacher who’d signed me up for classes that I did not need Algebra). I ended the year with a D (and only by the grace of every single math god in existence)… and probably even then only because I turned in my special Final exam practice packet for extra credit. It was not pretty, and it’s not something I’m particularly proud of but there it is. (Oddly in my junior year I did rather well with Trigonometry… though I did have a really easy teacher so I suppose I could chalk it up to that). The point is… I have always been bad at math. Even now I still add things up on my fingers (or with my phone calculator), whichever is easiest at the time. So… my first dreams of becoming a architect were dashed. I pretty much knew that, that dream was over by the time I was thirteen or fourteen (thankfully I then had writing to fall back on) but… it was still painful to realize. I still have a great love for architecture… I don’t think that will ever go away… the closest thing I have to it now however is a book called Story Structure Architect by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Ph.D. And while the cover is that familiar blue paper and white writing, for me it’s not quite the same. My math skills may never be quite up for the task of becoming an architect, every so often I like to pull out one of the many art pads I was given when I came to AI and draw the basics of blueprints for my future home.