My Books

I look upon Abigail fondly as the work of my teenage years. It's not my best writing, of course, but it was a good beginning.
And its origin is actually a funny story.

It all began when my brother Jordan was getting into computer animation, and I decided to write him a villain monologue to animate. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time. It never got animated. But that scene, where Duke Von Wargenbergg is pacing and venting his passionate feelings to the walls of his chamber, actually made it into the book. (How many books begin as a villain's monologue, I wonder?)
After I realized my brother would likely never animate my little scene, I decided to finish out the story anyway. I wrote it as a "screenplay" for school in my sophomore year.

A few years later, after graduating, I revisited and revised the story. And then submitted it to a small publishing company online, because I liked their mission statement. They accepted it, published it, didn't promote it at all (even though I paid them for "publicizing"), and ultimately went bankrupt.
And that, my friends, is the story.

(I still have approximately 100 copies in a box, if anyone is interested.)

My first introduction to Beauty and the Beast was of course the Disney classic (best hand-drawn animation of all time, in my opinion). So when I first read Beauty and the Beast in one of Lang's Fairy Books (the Blue one if I recall), it struck me that the Beast's character had no arc. He was kind and gentle throughout, cursed by no fault of his own. (In some versions he's supposed to be rather a simpleton.) This contrasts starkly against most modern versions I've come across. They all like to focus on the "bad-boy" Beast character, and his transformation. As I've implied, I love Disney's version, where the Beast is the one with the dramatic character growth, but ever since I read the older versions, I've wanted to tell the story focused on Beauty's growth as a character. So this, my version, has been developing and ripening over the past few years. I have woven into it truth from my own lived experiences, and overlaid the whole with the paradigm (easily ignored but ever present) of the Kingdom of Heaven.