Pages From a Burning Notebook Page One

I should tell you right off the bat that this isn't exactly going to be a very consistant series of essays. I'm a person of great many interests, and I'll be doing commentary on all of them. They'll be book reviews, stuff on comics, the anime that I'm watching, and other things as well. I may even include pieces of unwritten stories, things I couldn't quite get off the ground.

I thought I'd start with just a bit of a auto-biography, if that's not too egotistical.

My name is Shannon J.L., and I'm a male Canadian in my early thirties, living on Canada's west coast in the province of British Columbia. Lovely place, if you don't mind unpredictable rain and the occasional minor earthquake. I work in a local comic book shop, and sadly look like your typical comics fan in glasses. Sigh.

I first got into comics as a young child. A small kid, really. The story that's been passed down in the family is that I wouldn't read the usual picture books as a kid, and my mom tried me on comics instead. One look, and I was hooked.

As what can arguably be called an adult I'm still into reading comics, though I'd like to think my tastes have matured somewhat over the years. Warren Ellis is one of my favorite writers, as well as Neil Gaiman, Chris Claremont, Kevin Smith, Kurt Busiek, Fred Perry and many others. It was reading comics that brought me into manga as well...

As a child I saw the occasional Japanese cartoon on my TV. I caught a few Astro Boy reruns, Star Blazers (or Space Cruiser Yamato), Kimba the white Lion, Transformers, the french dub of Captain Harlock (I didn't understand it, but the pictures were nice), and Robotech. It was't until I was in my twenties that I discovered the bad dub of Sailor Moon, and as irritating as DIC's version of it was, I still got interested.

I began to get into anime fandom locally, started to surf the web for anime information and stumbled onto anime fanfiction. It took a while to get the nerve up to write anything myself, and my very early stuff is staying right here on my hard-drive, never to see the light of day, thank you very much. But eventually, I started to put my stuff up on the web.

After writing over fifty fanfics I'm finally starting to get into my own original stories as well. I've had a few readers ask me why I primarily write shoujo-ai (girl/girl) stories, and to be honest I'm still not quite sure. I started out with writing Sailor Moon, which is just full of shoujo- ai goodness, and found it very comfortable and easy to write. I suppose I like the romance of that sort of relationship, as odd as that may seem.

I'm also a bit of a science fiction and fantasy fan as well. Growing up I read a lot of Robert A. Heinlein, moving on up to Larry Niven, Spider Robinson, Robert Asprin, and dozens of other authors. Currently I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Moon and of the military sf fictions of David Weber. Honor Harrington forever! ^_^ In the fantasy end of the spectrum I think Mercedes Lackey is great, I like Neil Gaiman, Tanya Huff, and revere the god of fantasy madness, Terry Prattchet. If you have't read his Discworld series, you really should do so.

Anyway, there's some of my life in a nutshell. I'll be posting something up here every week or so, depending on time and the other projects that I'm working on. I may even rant occassionally, though that will hopefully not be very often.

Shane :)

Fanfiction site: www.fanfiction.net under shanejayell Back up sites: www.fandomination.net, mediaminer.org, both also under shanejayell Original fiction: www.fictionpress.net