Name: D.F. Age: 25 The adventure started around August-September 1992 in Laurel, Maryland at age 6 after seeing a toy commercial for girls and then getting strange dreams after that. In fact, strange dreams have been haunting me most of my life and have inspired me to create. (Fun fact: One of them came after playing Sonic the Hedgehog for the SEGA Genesis for the first time that year.) Two years later, December 25, 1994 at age 8 was the day I took the next step. I woke up that morning to find a strange, beige-looking computer thing on a table in a living room at my grandmother's house in North Carolina. I turn it on to see that the on-screen text was orange. This was a Brother WP-3410 word processor (My mom had written a chapter from Sideways Stories from Wayside School in one of the files). I had written a comic, When They Got Distracted from 1994 to 1999. Nobody got to see it, unfortunately (one person in class did, and that's pretty much it). I would continue to find adventure over the years until fall 2003 at age 17 when I signed up for a creative writing class in my senior year of high school. The first short story I wrote in that class didn't fare well, as the assignment said for some page limit I can't remember, and I went over it by one...it was 17 pages in all. I would also learn to write chapters in fanfiction, but I blew it big time at that, as none of them made any sense at all, until I wrote an original story in September 2004 at age 18 and constantly wrote sequels for that series until May 2009 at age 23. Fast forward to August 2009. Someone suggested to me that I get published after my dad had told her I liked to write. I wrote--in my room of an apartment with (get this) the computer and the TV in the room at the same time. My first story at the time was about cars, so I had constantly tuned in to Top Gear on BBC America and a show focusing on exotic cars called SuperCars Exposed on SPEEDVision (now SPEED Channel). I have since written two more stories in that series, which I have called Project Supercar every year, starting with 2010. Then, a big change happened March 8, 2011--a desktop computer I've had since 2001--originally running Windows 98 but modded to run Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 to meet a cable company's requirements for high-speed online--was garbage. By 2008, it got even worse. Videos wouldn't play completely and whenever I tried to play a sound, it would sound like a scratchy modem-like sound. I got a refurbished desktop--a Dell Optiplex GX520, running Windows XP Service Pack 3--whilst running into trouble repeatedly, I get it up and working, and weeks later I was back in business. One of my things on my to-do-list when I got the desktop was to buy Microsoft Office 2010, but as time went by, I forgot about it. I had did a trial version but didn't feel like writing, and the real thing is really expensive. I decided on an alternative that accepts Microsoft Word documents, OpenOffice (now LibreOffice, which ironically, I have running right now), and rolling along just fine. I suck at writing a story with a pencil and paper, so that's why I've used a computer over the years to do such tasks. As I enter my twentieth year of writing and character creation, I wonder what new things I'll run into next in this adventure. When writing, I am constantly facing new challenges every day, and getting ideas from experiences in life. Sometimes I won't feel like writing, and sometimes when ideas get in my head, I have to write them down fast before something drastic happens. My work is never done, and almost twenty years later, my adventure is not over. (I make most of my characters say that line in books I'm writing to signify the end of a chapter, starting in 2009).
