Basically my entire life, I've aspired to make things. My mother has told me that even as a toddler playing with a toy piano, I once played a melody she had never heard before, then days later played the exact same melody again. I have no memory of that particular instance, but I totally remember sitting at the family PC, using PowerPoint 2000 to fool around with pitches for story ideas. Like any young boy, I loved playing with Legos, but instead of sticking with the characters and themes of the original sets, I made up my own. And I remember daydreaming about stuff I wanted to see brought to life in animation.

Beyond childhood wishful thinking, there were some things that I did actually create in those early years. After I expressed an interest in the piano, my parents bought me a Yamaha keyboard, and my mom put together a custom-quilted soft case for that thing as I hauled it back and forth between grade-school music lessons and home. Beyond what I was learning, I experimented with composing my own works, coming up with several that I judged good enough to write down. Thinking back to what I remember of those, the closest published works they resembled was probably something like Bach's "Invention" pieces, though obviously far simpler. I started writing my music down on note paper that I crudely traced into staves, then switched to photocopied notation templates, and eventually got a MIDI interface for the keyboard that I could use to enter notes directly into Finale software on the family computer.

My first attempt at writing began as a school project, if I remember correctly. Though the assignment was only for the first chapter of a story (or something of the sort), I wanted to keep working and try to finish the project. I created maps to gather my thoughts and drafted several more chapters, but I quickly realized that I didn't yet have what it took to keep going. Being only loosely familiar with the typical mechanics of a story, I knew the action needed a climax (and had an idea of what I wanted to write for that), but I had no idea how to actually develop my story in that direction. After running out of ideas, I abandoned that project and wouldn't attempt a complex, long-form narrative project again until much later in my life.

All of these early things have long since been lost to time. But they were the start of my journey, even before I knew where I would later walk.