As you know, guest bloggers appear on my site twice a month. For the months of August, September, and October, my guests will be discussing the same topic:
When and why did you begin writing?
This week we’ll learn a little bit more about Sacha Black. Thanks, Sacha!
I had a cupboard.
I was nine and it was built into my bedroom wall like an adults’ closet, a fact I used to feel smug about because it was in my room and not my parent’s.
At first, I used to store things in it, like toys and roller skates. Then after a particularly bad day at school with bullies, I came home and wanted to hide. Usually, I’d grab a book and run into the fields to climb a tree and read till sunset. But it was winter and by the time I was home from school, darkness had fallen.
I looked at the cupboard – it was just big enough for one small child to fit inside. So I yanked open the door and threw everything into the middle of my bedroom floor. I sat inside and slammed the door shut. I cried, not because of the bullies, but because it was cold, dark and uncomfortable and not the safe haven I’d expected.
I took pillows, a blanket, a torch and what I’d thought was a book back into the cupboard. But it wasn’t a reading book, it was a sketch book. Instead of finding a reading book, I grabbed a pen and started doodling. Doodles turned to words, which turned into a story. That was the first real story I ever wrote, and I wrote it in a cupboard!
The creatures in the story were called Praeth. Even then I wrote fantasy, it was my little way of escaping, of creating worlds where I would fit in and didn’t have to explain myself or be the school weirdo because I liked books and studied hard.
I rewrote that story several more times, expanding and building each time as my skills and knowledge developed. That short story called Praeth eventually got so long that on August 20th 2016, twenty years after I inked the first full stop, it was a completed novel called Keepers. Next year, I’ll publish it, and I’ll put the first copy next to that very first notebook which I still have.
Why do I write? I write because stories are woven into my blood like oxygen. When I was created, instead of filling my DNA with genetic material, someone put characters and words into there and now those characters’ bark at me until I sit down and pen their stories. They demand to be told like the government demands taxes. This isn’t a choice. I was born to tell stories.
Author’s Bio:
Sacha is a nightwalker carefully treading the line between light and dark, strange and unusual. A hunter desperately pursuing the right words to chronicle stories. Sacha was always meant to write, she was the girl who spent her lunch break tucked away in the corner of the school library, head buried in a pile of books, pencil in hand, weaving stories on the page. But she grew up, stumbled and fell forgetting her dream and then spent a while lost in a dark and twisted place. Then, one day she sat in front of her laptop and started to write. She remembered that all she’d ever wanted to do was write stories in faraway places filled with curious creatures and magical happenings. Sacha is also a mother to a toddler terror tot and wife to a beautiful woman.
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