Lifelong Creative Partners

While friends and partners come into our lives at different points, our siblings are there from the start. Siblings are our first childhood playmates and rivals, key to honing our creativity through games and adventures.

My siblings and I are the “just come home before dark” generation and spent summers in our native Maryland trekking through nearby farmers’ fields to hunt newts in distant creeks, scavenging treasures from the “junkyard” (a wooded gully where a farmer tossed sundry broken bits), and daring each other to go into the “graveyard” (a spooky pine grove littered with bovine bones). We improvised stories to ride tandem with our adventures, mostly stolen from TV shows such as Charlies Angels, Battlestar Galactica, and Scooby Doo (and I mean the originals). It was a start!

My brother, Glenn, championed my first creative scribblings, reading my 1,000-page, handwritten tome (1,000 actual pages), inspired by all the cyberpunk anime we watched together and spread over three rickety three-ring binders in messy scrawl—gobs of whiteout, little editing.

At eleven, Glenn was a budding artist and painstakingly illustrated parts of the story, manga style. Sadly, his masterpiece is lost, but our mother salvaged a few of the initial sketches below (and Glenn will probably scalp me for sharing these).

Flash forward to today, and Glenn is still championing my stories. After reading Beneath a Sun Deprived Sky, he created some amazing art for characters Del and Tam, using his mad graphic design skills. Wowed by how spot on he got the vibe and the characters, I wanted to share.

Much love and gratitude to my siblings. I doubt I’d have discovered the joy of writing without them (my Barbie Star Wars script collaboration with my sister is a tale for another time).