Quelzalcoatl

For those who haven't realised by now, I'm Dutch. I taught myself English at age nine, because I wanted to be able to follow Star Trek: Next Generation, which was being rerun on BBC. Unfortunately, not only was it in English, the subtitles were English as well. For the next twelve years, I have been learning, studying and self-teaching English as a hobby. At age eleven, I got into writing, so I have been writing for a decade already. At fourteen, I came across the band Cradle of Filth, and after studying the lyrics, I realised there were a lot of words I didn't know still, but that I did wanted to have knowledge of. Thusly, I started to read dictionaries, use the words I had learned in my writing and broaden my English vocabulary.

Today, I'm twenty-one and English comes more naturally to me than my own language. Ninety percent of the time, I read, write and even speak English - on off times - since I don't tend to say much in real life, unless it adds to a conversation. I've tried to study many things, tried many educations over the years, and nothing really grabbed my attention. I've tried to be an accountant, and while I'm surprisingly very proficient at accounting, the education didn't teach me anything I had yet to know. So I went to Mediacollege Amsterdam, to study Graphic Design, but again, they didn't teach me anything I had yet to know; I was taught the basics of Photoshop, drawing, typography, the basics of HTML. I am very averse to going over things I already know, unless I'm trying to make sure my facts are correct.

So I stopped. I didn't know what to do, and thought about it long and hard. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but alas, not only is it hard to come up with a good, solid, original plot and write it out in a way that was entertaining and logically sound, not only to me, but to the people who eventually had to read the book, trying to get someone to publish it was its own Hell altogether.

First, I decided, I needed an education, something substantial that I could fall back on when my book ideas didn't come off the ground. I went to a website of a school that provides college, as well as university degree educations, called LOI.nl. I knew my English was well beyond college level, and I really didn't want to waste time and effort sitting in a classroom, learning what I already knew. There was a test there, that I could do, that would determine my knowledge in the English language from a Dutch perspective, and just as I had thought, my English is at university level.

I saw the doors of possibilities open before my eyes; I could quite basically skip college altogether, and go straight to university, all I had to do is take this one course for a whole year, a course that could possibly solidify my proficiency in the English language, and then I could take a four-year education that would, most likely, end up challenging me mentally like I haven't been challenged in a long, long time.

I had decided that I'd become an English-Dutch-English translator. This encompasses transcipts, manuals, books, face-to-face conversation translation, et cetera. This was, quite honestly, what I did for my family in day to day life as well; my mum would, for instance, tell me what she wanted to say in Dutch, and I'd translate it in legible English for her. This was what I liked, nay, loved to do. And as a side-effort, I could write as well, now that I had a safety net to work with.

Yes, this would be my path, I decided. But that wasn't all. For the past year, I had been developing characters that were honestly quite wholesome, whose mental processes and psychology intrigued even myself. From there also sprung a character called Fenrisúlfr Holt. Now, in RPG, it's normal to use a so-called "play-by" to represent your character, and since I have always had a firm foot in science-fiction, Star Trek especially, I decided on Chris Pine. You may recognise him from my avatar, and that was to be the physical manifestation of the Horror In My Head. I have always been fascinated by psychology, and especially the psychology of Fenrisúlfr - Fenrir for short - intrigued me more than anything else.

Suddenly, an idea came to me. I realised that it reminded me of the Hannibal Lecter series, but was still entirely different, for the main reason that the Hannibal Lecter series were written in the perspective of Special Agent Clarice Sterling. And as for Hannibal Rising, well, Fenrir never had a reason to do what he did, he just does it. There was no revenge, no motive, just an infinitely insane, yet rational human being, and how he lived his life. I was going to write a story that was similar to, yet unlike any other. In my story, the psychopathic killer would be the protagonist.

It's all in my head, and every day I spend thinking about it, the more information comes to me. Everything I know, every fact and piece of information I've gathered over the years can be used one way or another in this. It would be my playground.