Hey, I guess I’ve been writing on and off for the entirety of my life. This is the first time I’ve made a big push to be professional. Between working in the military, warehouses, and going to university I figured I’d pursue something I wanted instead of always just grinding and drinking on the weekends. (I am still drinking on the weekends)
As a kid I really loved Star Wars and Star Trek and wished there was a series that could encapsulate both aspects in a series - then I watched Firefly. Having grown up in the South around a pretty “rough” blue-collar demographic, and that environment only being accentuated by the military and overnight warehouses, I found myself in a particular sweet spot between several different cultures influencing my life.
I had the intellectual curiosity of a more academic environment, the humor of the working class, and the faith of the Church. As I grew older I began to wonder just how exactly would these aspects interact in the same settings I already knew and loved, especially after being “given permission” by series quite like,” Firefly”, that showed me fiction in a very real light that I had never really considered prior.
  Before, my imagination was limited to Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, and the like where the off-color comment was a showcase of a poor character and a foreshadowing of someone’s demise rather than the very real cuss of a man with a nail in his boot. I quickly became infatuated with the notion that we should not be illustrating men as they ought - but simply illustrate them as they are. Well, I refer to men neutrally for both male and female characters. Many times we cloud our heads with the images of the ultra-feminine or hyper-masculine paragons of virtue that we never see in real life. I’d rather showcase the sweat and bile-covered nurse working a double shift, the tired man coming home at 8 am after working a twelve-hour shift mining lead out of ballast tanks overnight.
Throughout my life, it has dawned on me that this is the beauty of creation itself. That pain, toil, grime, loss, despair, sorrow, fatigue, and a grumpy disposition are features of life - not bugs. This is the type of thing I’d prefer to showcase in my writing. The story of real people, doing real things, in a fantastical albeit relatable setting.