Introducing Gunpowder Organic

It was a dark and stormy night.

Suddenly, a shot rang out.

A door slammed.

The maid screamed.

Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!

While millions of people were starving,

the king lived in luxury. 

Meanwhile,

On a small farm in Kansas, 

a boy was growing up. 

~It was a Dark and Stormy Night, by Snoopy Brown

Most of my life, I have felt my writing has had Snoopy's characteristic scattershot style to it. No one is quite sure where any idea came from, or why they are all connected, but I promise that it will all tie together...in the next book! 

The earliest story I remember writing was a revisionist history novel, which I wrote when I was seven or so. It was awful, but I managed to turn out a very impressive word count for someone so small. I remember hitting ten thousand words. I don't remember if I wrote more after that. That computer bit the dust many years ago, for which I am truly thankful. While some early works of authors can be hilarious, any remaining copies of mine should be collected and burned, and the burners should enjoy a pizza afterward for a job well done. 

I have written a lot since that era of young folly, but all of my completed works are short stories, or novels that I co-authored. When I am left to my own devises, I often leave a trail of unfinished works behind me. Stories that have no end, or are missing a middle, or various chapters that aren't attached to anything. These sit, usually, until they are lost or mislabeled or ever so rarely, picked up and reworked. The majority of my writing for the last ten years has been in the form of writing circles in Ditto Town, an old haunt of mine. For some reason, Ditto Town has kept me writing, not matter how busy I am. I fail to understand this, mainly because all of my friends who have left Ditto Town did so because they were too busy and could not find time. I still regularly visit Ditto Town to this day.

College took me farther away from work on novels, due to the highly analytical nature of my degree program. With room for very few English Lit classes in my schedule, my nervous pencil energy was diverted to drawing bones, and the smoke rising from my laptop was more from the frying of electronics than from my furious typing (yes, I did cause my computer to literally explode). In an odd twist, my artistic writing tendencies started expressing themselves in my secondary language, French (English is my mother tongue, but I first learned French as a child). I immediately found this frustrating as I didn't have the breadth of vocabulary to accommodate my writing style, yet I struggled even more with expressing basic plots in English. I felt as if my brain had caged up my Muse and refused to let her out, so she had dug an escape route to my composition centers through a foreign language. I shudder to wonder what stories she would have come up with if my secondary language was German!

The main story that I wrote (and continue to work on) from that time is called Balafre, and if I were to give it an English title, it would be Scarface. It is a topsy-turvy story of fairytales gone wrong, but is mainly based on the tale of Beauty and the Beast. Of course, my Belle is Balafre. Rereading the tale consistently reminds me of early storytelling ventures. I suppose writing skills grow the same in any language.

It was with great relief, then, that I finally realized I have a new story idea, one that I hope to be able to fully develop this year. My friends sometimes joke that I am really a secret agent, spying on mutinous agencies and protecting the world from their malice. While I'm afraid this is simply not true, I hope to put the skills that  they point to as evidence of my double life to work in my newest story, one that actually has a secret agent in it. Meanwhile, I shall spend my evenings with the lovely Tea Spitters, sipping hot beverages, typing in all caps, and preparing to dazzle the mad, mad world with our collective brilliance.

Oh, yes. I forgot one thing.

The name's Organic. Gunpowder Organic. And yes, that is a tea.