location: Southern California
occupation: still keeping my day job
aliases: Shades MacLean, Scoot the Ko’An, Neko-Sen’nin (in case you should run into me elsewhere in cyberspace)
interests: the 3 R’s, Reading, Writing and Rock & Roll
hobbies: writing, walking, video games, designing sigs/avatars and Winamp skins
Shadesmaclean is a college graduate who has been writing since high school. Currently working on...
Okay, okay, that last part read way too much like the beginning of a bestselling author’s bio, so let’s get real. I’ve been making up stories since I was a kid, and have been writing since I was in middle school. I wrote a couple books in high school… that never saw the light of day and never will, and the world’s probably a better place for it. In college I co-wrote the Book of Hondo with several friends’ collaboration, and later several short stories. In recent years, I’ve turned my attention to something that started in high school.
…Though it might be more accurate to say that it started way before that. When I was a kid, especially in middle school, I had several friends that I used to role-play with— nothing fancy, no profile sheets, no dice, no sourcebooks, hell, I didn’t even know what D&D was back then— my friends making up their own characters within a certain world, and me making up scenarios and other characters along the way. Much of the series I’m currently writing, Tradewinds, is loosely based on the world(s) of The Adventure (as we used to refer to it), adapted and written for an older audience. This is the third “incarnation” of the series, rewritten from scratch, with older drafts only serving as notes, and I can only hope it does justice to all my old friends’ imagination and the sense of adventure we shared at school and playing out in the woods when we were kids.
As far as influences go, I draw from a lot of sources. As a kid, I was into a lot stuff from the Twilight Zone to Star Wars to those Choose Your Own Adventure stories to that pile of National Geographics in the corner, tantalizing me with a thousand exotic destinations. Some of my favorite writers are Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Douglas Adams, Robert Jordan, H P Lovecraft, and I’ve really been getting into Terry Pratchett and Tony Hillerman. I also read a lot manga, and some of my favorites include Naruto, Saiyuki/Reload, xxxHolic, Love Hina, and Azumanga Daioh. I also like a lot of video games, ranging from Zelda or Suikoden to Silent Hill or Fatal Frame to various fighting games. I listen to such a wide range of music that it exceeds the scope of this bio, so I’ll just name some of my favorites: 311, Bad Religion, Pennywise, Offspring, Rancid, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, At the Drive-In / Mars Volta, the Eels, Weird Al Yankovic, Powerman 5000, and Rage Against the Machine.
But enough about me, this place is really more about the writing than the writer. I just hope this shed some light on where I’m coming from when I’m at the keyboard.
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