Although there were tons of influences that made me want to write. The first real time I fell in love with reading and creating a story was through Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events”

This is my first blog post I’ve ever written so bear with me. The first author that I found that I just couldn’t seem to read their books fast enough was Lemony Snicket. Although I can’t say exactly when I found his books, it was probably around fourth or fifth grade. Fresh out of reading all the Magic Tree House and Goosebumps books that I could get my hands on, Lemony Snicket took on a whole new fascination for me. His story wasn’t happy (how could it be when he prefaces it so many times) but weeding through the extraordinary and unbelievable aspects of some of the characters, they were real. At least as real as words on a page can be.

They had real feelings, real adversity to overcome, and overall a real feeling of how life doesn’t always have a happy beginning, or even a happy middle, but through perseverance and thousands of setbacks could have a happy end. Even if that happy ending doesn’t fall into a picture perfect version of what a happy ending should be. Through all the misfortune they endured they never faltered in trying to create a better existence for themselves which really stuck with me. Their story, as silly as it sounds, was one of the things that opened my little elementary school eyes to the human experience and how devastatingly unfair it is to some.

Only in writing this blog post did I really realize how much this series actually influenced the formative years of my own writing. When I set out to write “Cryo” I wasn’t trying to write under any particular genre. I wanted to create a character who felt real to me, and who the reader would be able to follow their journey through navigating a world after they lost the only thing that made the world make sense to them in the first place.

Although the world I created would be classified as dystopian or sci-fi, I think that the human experience is the most important aspect in regards that it has no genre. The story of loss and trying to find new meaning isn’t specific to any genre or any person. For everyone that experience is very individualized, where everyone experiences it differently, this is how I envisioned Louis King’s journey through loss. The world is hundreds of years in the future, but the people throughout the story are people you could meet tomorrow or could have met yesterday. I guess that is where the major tie in I have with my first beloved series. That in creating a sometimes maybe ‘unbelievable’ world, the people in it are real. While Louis King figuratively lost his whole world he also literally loses almost everything about the old world that he knew. Though the faces change, the human experience remains the same.