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HOW IT ALL BEGAN ... the chills and thrills of my writing

Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well and trying your best to stay out of trouble. I'm sure not. Anyway, so, I first started writing way back when I was in Starr Elementary School. We were known as the Star Stars, the other schools were the Gilkey Geckos and Cooper Koalas... Yes, I know, you probably think that Star's name was corny, but that's what we were, the stars of Plainwell! Anywho, the first stories I remember writing were Goosebumps rip-offs called Chills and Thrills with my friend, Katie. We originally called it Goose Bumps Jr., but my sister said we should get an original title, so we did. I believe we completed one of them and started a handful of others, but I lost them. They're gone now, never to return, and that's probably a good thing. In all honestly, they'd be fun to read now, just to see for old time's sake. While the pesky title continues to elude me, I remember one of them was about a mood ring. For all you out there who might not know what they are, they were multi-colored rings from the '90s that changed color depending on your mood, or so it was said. If they still exist now, I'd be curious to know. The ring, not to be confused with the One Ring or the Ring movie, would cause something bad to happen depending on the color. An example would be blue caused bad luck, red made the floor turn to lava, yellow caused squirrels to become giant and eat people, and green made flesh-eating demonic moths descend from the heavens to consume all they made contact with. Okay, I may or may not have just made the fourth one up, but you get the point. So, I guess in short that the reason I started writing was because of all the books I enjoyed when I was younger such as Goosebumps and the Box Car Children, then later Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, the Wheel of Time, and A Song of Ice and Fire. Video games were a big influence, too, games like Legend of Zelda, Mario, Dragon Age, Fire Emblem, and Mass Effect all helped influence me to become the story writer I am now. I know a lot of those are typical for people who like fantasy and all that fun stuff, but it's true! My favorite stories have always had some type of fantasy element stuck in them. Maybe it's just because all the make-believe stuff is fun, more room for your imagination to sprawl and think of crazy radicle ideas. Outside of the nice pleasant journey into Lala Land when reading books and playing games, another aspect that influenced me to start writing was all crazy and wacky games I played during recess and in school. Most of it started in fourth grade with my friend, Cameron, in a game we called Dimensions. We had Earth, the Dimension of Time, the Dragon Dimension, the Chegal Dimension (Cheetah-Eagle hybrids), the Dox Dimension (Dog-Fox hybrids), the Unicorn Dimension, the Unidragon Dimension, and Ratonia (where my pet rat, Whiskers, and all my friend's rats lived. What? Rats are adorable and make great pets.) In Boy Scouts, we had a similar game but with a different set of dimensions, such as Narnia, Middle Earth, and Razada, the last one being the world of a fantasy book I wrote but lost. I hope you all enjoyed reading this. If you have any questions, would like to sign up for emails, or just want to say hi, please email me at zkuhlbooks@outlook.com







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