I was a child in love with paper. Obsessed with Yu-gi-Oh!, I took to making my own cards, scribbling down names of fake monsters on index cards and playing with the cards as if they were real. Hey, it was some sort of writing, right?

My home was littered with elaborate level designs for fictional video games and lengthy descriptions of fictional worlds. My school notebooks featured zany comics. In those early years, my imagination always found as much form on paper as it did in play. I’ve never lost the obsession. I have four full notebooks from just this last year replete with journal entries, poems, sketches and daydreams.

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These years spent playing card games and imagining up endless fantasy worlds stealthily taught me a lot in a way that I didn’t even understand until recently was actually teaching. From these games I learned math and strategy, but also I encountered a different culture (the distinctly Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh! cards) and interacted with their symbols and stories while also interacting with own culture’s symbols and stories. For every

The Kappa is a mythological Japanese river creature known for its trickery ranging from the innocently passing gas to murder and rape. I’ll admit, I have no clue why this particular Kappa is psychic. Japan is weird that way.

Psychic Kappa, there was also a Baneslayer Angel: a cultural counterpoint. I learned the thrill of well-played games, the dramatic storytelling behind the Yu-Gi-Oh! television show, and how to play with symbols and adapt them to ways that worked for me. I often included the Masamune, a Japanese mythological sword, as a weapon in the games I thought up in my head, without realizing all the cultural weight it carried.

And this, all this, was above all fun! I wrote like this and did this for fun.

One way of looking at this is that I’ve always had a need for writing. According to my mom, after I decided that I didn’t want to be a fireman, a barber or a priest, I settled on writer.  Many of my imaginings then and now are still of grand, award-winning stories. Do these get written? Nope. Do my dreams sometimes flutter out of my ears and onto the floor, often viewed but rarely pick up again? Yes.

Luke, meet writing. Writing, meet Luke.