About
My name is Matthew Wallace. I am eighteen years old and an amateur writer, graphic and web designer and a professional human being. I am currently attending Memorial University of Newfoundland where I am working for a Bachelor of Arts in English, with an undeclared Minor.
I started writing back in Grade 4 when I was 9 years old. In those days my writing was a little undefined, but it showed great potential. According to my teachers, my stories were thought provoking and kept them reading, even if they did suffere grammatical and spelling mistakes and misconceptions. The first story I can ever remember writing was entitled "The Cat at Midnight". It was one typed page long, and I can even remember the flame banner I had around it, because flames were cool. The story itself was in first person and based around a character who witnesses a man mourning his dead cat. However the man wasn't mourning, he was asking the cat why. I ended it there, and planned on continuing it some other time. The whole thing was written for school and recieved an A+ in the end.
After that my writing kind of laid on the backburner. About a week before I wrote this I was cleaning my bookshelf when I came across an old notepad I had used to write stories before we got a computer. I leafed through it and read pieces of writing. Back then, it seems, flash fiction was enough for me as I barely wrote 100 words per piece. Still, in reading a few of those pieces I was overcome with a wave of nostalgia. Surprisingly a lot of them I can still remember what I wanted to do, where I was going to go with them and so forth. Yet at the same time I can't remember when or where I wrote them. I've always had a good memory when it came to my plots; I barely ever write anything down that isn't the story itself.
My writing really became a big part of my life during Grade 9 at the age of 14. That was when I created one of my first noteworthy stories. Although all copies of the manuscript were lost, both hard and digital, I can still remember what it was about. The story was called "A Planet Called Home" and it was a sci-fi based around four humans who were abducted by an alien race called the Kests. The Kests placed them on a planet with a premade shelter for them. They then survived for several years while being studied by the Kests. However the Kests decided it was time to intervene and introduce themselves. The climax of the plot was an attack by space pirates as the protagonists flew through space, getting the details of their abduction explained to them by the Kests. This story was 27 pages long, and I can still remember my plans for a sequel. Basically the planet they were placed on was in danger of exploding, so with a team of Kests they were to venture to the center to set the matter right.
It's a shame all copies were lost, as even today I would love to read it. If only for the nostalgia involved. I showed the story to everyone, even my stictest of teachers. It was met with praise by everyone who read it. That is probably why that is the defining moment in my writing career. I didn't want to actually become a writer until three years later. In the meantime, during Grade 11 at age 16 I was introduced to e-fedding, which would be the next defining moment.
E-fedding is virtual wrestling judged by roleplays, or short stories, wrote about the characters. It's explained more in my e-fedding section, so I won't go into detail here. In Grade 11 one of the three English teachers in my high school had correspondence with a man named Dave Snow. Dave wanted to create a writing group for the small town of Lewisporte, so he was looking to recruit students. When the announcement was made, myself and two of my now-best friends met it with enthusiasm. Ironically the two friends are the co-owners of Breaking the Lemon with myself.
Dave introduced me to two key things in my life. The first was Dungeons & Dragons, which fueled my passion for the fantasy genre, and the other, the more important one, was e-fedding. Dave got myself and my two friends into it, and we've been addicted ever since. To the point where we have our e-federation, the Legendary Wrestling Federation. But that's more recent. Back then we were new, and we were learning. The only problem was Dave didn't stick with his own feds, so twice we started and twice we were abandoned.
E-fedding has had me constantly writing. Every week or two I'd have to spew out two or three short stories at about 1,200 words a piece. It's to the point where writing 1,200 words comes naturally to me. So naturally that in the LWF I tend to get all my roleplays done with utmost quality within the first couple of days each card.
The sport of e-fedding gradually lost its hype, and I went back to normal writing as Dave abandoned his second federation. I wrote many stories, but I could never finish any of them. I always used to throw all my enthusiasm for a new plot in right away and then abandon the story, even one of my favorite pieces, the Nothing series. I even tried NaNoWriMo, but my excuse for that was that it was a bad month. November is cut in half by an influx of midterm exams which couldn't be avoided, so I stopped writing at 8,000 words and abandoned my NaNoWriMo story.
And then came my greatest acheivement to date, as of July 12th, 2008. The story Funky Town. For some reason this story stuck. I just kept writing and writing, but all the time I feared I'd stop, that I'd abandon it. So much I feared it that I drove myself to write it as much as possible to get it finished before I lost interest. But I didn't lose interest. It's the first story I ever wrote to break the 10,000 word mark, ranging at roughly 15,000 words. It can be found in my Writings section.
I still wish to write, but as I write this I suffer from writers block that seems to ignore e-fedding. Writing my roleplays has not changed, I still spew them out, but I can't seem to start a story, let alone continue it or finish it these days. It'll come to me someday. My goal right now is to finish an entire novel. So wish me luck and thanks for reading.