*tap tap*

Twould seem proper to start with an introduction. Hi, I'm Rachel. At the moment (my time, not necessarily whenever you've stumbled across this blog), I'm 25 years old. I am a writer in the strictest sense of the term: I write. I've always been a writer. For some time I thought I would go into television, and even graduated from film school in Los Angeles; after time, however, I grew disillusioned with that field. Several people suggested that my ideas are better suited to comic books, being as they are populated with time travelers and demons and shapeshifters and shotgun-toting lesbians and monsters. This is handy, since I was born and raised in Oregon and Portland has become something of a comic-book nexus. Portland-ho.

My primary genre is fantasy, with a bend towards the horrific. It's kind of weird, because as a kid I could never watch horror movies. All the biggest names in the genre, I've never watched. I had awful nightmares all on my own, of things dragging me out of bed and ripping me apart; people say you don't die in your dreams, but I always did. Wait, I guess it's not so weird, then, that I'm drawn to the horror genre. My nightmares have just grown up into serial killers and vengeful demons. The point is, I've never read H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King and I've never reveled in the delights of Romero or Barker. All the horror I've ever known was internal.

So, here I am! I intend to use this blog to talk about my projects and the process of writing these hairbrained ideas.

At the moment I'm writing the graphic novel "A Teenager's Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse." I originally started it as a prose novel, but it's undergone some major changes and the more I worked on it the more I realized that it would work best in a graphic format. For all the fact that the gen-yu-ine ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE lurches near, I find myself writing out the awkward teenaged romance part first...which is possibly the right way to go about it, because that's really the emotional core of the story. Or possibly I'm just so enamored of Kara and Max both that I can't focus on the zombies quite yet.



What I'm reading: "What It Is," by Lynda Barry. Dramatically and interestingly illustrated, but I feel like the format overpowers the content. You'll find that I have a very utilitarian outlook: I judge an item of clothing by how many pockets it has. As someone just starting out in the field, I can't say the book was particularly helpful; it did contain a few moments of brain-turning -- that feeling you get when your thoughts pivot and find a step that you didn't know was there -- but on the whole it was rather pretty and rather pointless. I had it on loan from the library, so I couldn't do the exercises in the back. There's a chance that I didn't have access to the book's full potential. Still, I wouldn't really recommend it to someone else looking into the field.