I guess I’ve always wanted to be a writer. My family moved a bit when I was younger, and my parents said that they worried because I spent so much time alone. Every second I spent alone was one where I was creating a story either in my head or with the help of my extensive Lego collection. While going through one of my old boxes, I came across the very first full story I wrote, Lost On an Island. I think I was in fifth grade at the time. My parents have always been very supportive of all of the strange things I like to do in my life so they laminated my hand drawn and colored cover and we stapled the whole thing together. I think it’s about 8 pages, written in my rather large fifth-grade print.
Since then, I’ve done a lot of growing up, most of it for the better, but some of it would be more accurately categorized as “character building”. I graduated from Port Angeles High School in Port Angeles, WA and then decided to attend the College Of Saint Catherine in Saint Paul, MN, now known as Saint Catherine University. Full of passion and stories, I started in the undergraduate program to receive my BA in English with a Creative Writing focus. I wrote whatever genre my current semester’s writing class included, which was usually fiction, poetry, memoirs, and other things that didn’t include serial killers or demons. Even though I was not exactly writing about dragons and magic, I learned a lot about writing and the writing process. All writing is writing you can learn from. I did successfully graduate in four years and even added minors in Latin and Philosophy. I’m not really sure what I expected to do with any of that, but I at least enjoyed all the classes I took, with the notable exception of all the mandatory math and science related classes. I didn’t do very well in those.
After I finished with my undergraduate degree, I joined the real world, but didn’t really feel like living in a cardboard box. I spent several years working at different Target stores in a couple different states. I even did a small stint at Hastings. Restlessness finally drove me elsewhere. Now I travel a lot and meet a lot of new and fascinating people. It’s a good life and I enjoy what I do.
Finally deciding that I wanted to actually get back into writing, I found Seton Hill University’s graduate school program. SHU offers an MFA in writing popular fiction. The program only recently became an MFA program, so when I graduated in January 2011, I received a simple MA. Because of the amazing people and classes offered in this very unique program, I have now finished several drafts of my first novel, Accept Fire and Blood. Unfortunately, finishing a novel is just the tip of the iceberg. The revision process continues to be long and time-consuming, and I want to send the novel out to agents and publishers sometime ever. Then in 2014, I decided I wanted to teach once I finished with my current career. I returned to SHU to upgrade my MA to an MFA and I’m currently working on a new project. The story is exciting and I like where it’s going, but I don’t want to talk it up too much because I’m still not very far along with it.
One of the interesting points about why I decided to go back for my MFA and pursue teaching and writing is that I met someone amazing who changed my entire life. It was that individual who first introduced Asexuality to me and when I did a bit of research and a lot of soul-searching, I realized that I am 10000% Asexual. That did a lot to explain why I’d felt broken and never interested in sex throughout my whole life. My own Asexuality reflects heavily in my work, as my characters have this tendency on focusing on the task at hand and not on love triangles. While there is love involved, there’s a distinct lack of sex.
I’m currently working on several projects, the second book in my intended Wildlands series, Betray, parts of story bits for a novel I want to call Child of Chaos, a young adult novel Janitor, and one other side project that I’m not going to give any details about. I also write a good deal of poetry and make giant graph paper art, one of which is the Giant Awesome Pattern, which is the first piece I’ve ever made for myself and I started it because I wanted to make something beautiful. I seem to be rather ambitious taking all this on at once, but I’m hoping it will all work out for the best. The more I write, the happier I am, and the greater the chances that I can actually be a published author. I’m hoping that my Explorers trilogy about two asexual women adventuring in space will be my first novels published but we’ll see.
C.A. Jacobs
C.A. Jacobs 