I started writing at the age of 12, but didn't find my voice until I got into poetry four years later. The creative writing I penned thru the rest of high school was largely poetry, but I also dabbled in short prose and screenplays. After high school I attended film school in Chicago for a short stint, dropping out after suffering a couple psychotic breaks. When I returned home, I began working as salesman/laborer for my parents' upholstery business. In my spare time, I would write short scripts for fun. Between roughly 6 months to a year I completed around 30 short scripts, a trilogy of feature length screenplays, and wrote the first half of a feature length script based on The Beatles' song Rocky Raccoon. In that time, I also produced and directed three of the shorts I had written. Six years ago I met the woman of my dreams, who inspired knew stories in me the likes of which I had not realized before. Being caught up in romance, I put my writing on the back burner. Three years ago I was arrested and charged with felony heroin possession, effectively starting the awkward transition from a 2 year heroin habit to struggling to get clean thru a handful of relapses. Life had to be put on hold so I could recover and get myself healthy, which I did. Despite rebuilding my stability and returning to my creativity, my computer died on me before I could replace the broken external hard drive I used to store my creative works. Every single original copy of all the poems, stories, screenplays, and short films I created is now stranded on my lifeless laptop, probably lost forever. Now I am starting from scratch.