When someone suddenly asks me without warning to tell them about myself, I'm often left at a loss for what to say. But if they ask me to write about myself, I can generally come up with what they have in mind.
I was born in County Durham on the 16th of November 1985, on the island some refer to as 'Britain', some 'England', and the rest simply as 'the UK'. I can honestly say that from the start I was creative, with a three legged cat I drew when I was three still gracing my grandmother's living room wall.
I spent my first seven years of school at Tudhoe Colliery Primary, moving on to spend the next eight at Spennymoor Comprehensive, having decided at the end of my GCSEs to spend three years in the school's 6th Form to study A-Levels. One dominant thing that has remained constant through all that was my love of drawing, reading, and music. These were often my only solace during my years at Spennymoor Comprehensive, where my love of reading and quiet nature made me a constant target for bullies. One bully might be stopped by the teachers, but another was always around the corner, and I quickly learned to ignore the taunts and abuse, mostly verbal but sometime physical, and got on with my work. It paid off, and I eventually left school with thirteen GCSEs, an AS, and four A-Levels.
My life has been rather quiet since then, with learning to drive being the main interesting point of the last five years. Despite my good grades I've come across one rather dissapointing lesson in that time... Being good on an academic level doesn't make it easy to get a job. I'd decided against University, being too much of a generalist to specialise in a single subject for three or four years (Not to mention I didn't like the thought of ending up with 15k+ of debt with no guarantee of a job at the end of it), instead opting to find work and get some skills training on the side. After training in computer networking I unfortunately failed my CCNA final, and at present I'm not in a position to do a resit as I would have to do a refresher... which I can't afford.... As it is the above lesson proved to be true, with my wide array of grades being rather lacking in pushing power when getting a job, that is employers want people with practical experience, not theory credits. It's the classic "catch 22", you need experience, but you can't get the job to gain it.
In the end I've worked part time as an office cleaner (A great many vacancies for those in County Durham), a Post Office Clerk (Unfortunately for me the post office I worked at was closed. All hail government initiatives, as if it wasn't hard enough for me to get a decent job.) and most recently I work in a local "corner shop".
You might be wondering now where writing books came
into all this. Well in truth I've been doing it in some form or other
since I first began learning to write, with a number of my teachers in
those early years commenting on my love of stories and my creativity.
Later I took to thinking stories through in my head, though I never
wrote them down. It wasn't until the start of 2005 that I discovered a
possible outlet for my imagination, and that was a website called
Fanfiction.net. I read stories based on games I'd played and tv shows
I'd
watched for well over a year before the maelstrom of ideas in my own
head spurred me into action. I joined the site in mid 2006, putting pen
to paper, or rather fingers to keyboard, for the first time in a
setting where my writing would be seen by others.
And so the fanfic writer Alaia Skyhawk was born, and now, four years later, I have thirteen stories on the site, some complete and others not, with my total for archived words now at over 1,220,000. I owe a great deal to that site, and to the people who have read my stories and given me support through their reviews during the past four years. Three of those have become good friends of mine who I talk to regularly, and who in fact have characters of their own devising featured in my stories. Those years have refined my abilities a great deal and taught me a lot about creative writing... as evidenced by comparing my first work, the early chapters of "Prequel to a Restoration", to my most recent updates on stories such as "Restoration and Redemption" and "Zelda: Winds of a New Darkness". I look back at that early work now and I realise something, it wasn't just my writing that the site and the people who use it had changed, it was myself. Years of bullying had shattered my confidence, but three years of support and stories have given it back to me. That brings me to where I am now, at the completion of my first book and the start of my second... Putting pen to paper to bring to the world the lands that live in my imagination.
