I write under the pen name Shaun Jackson, M. for a lot of my major fictional writing projects. Although, I only recently got into the habit of writing with this pen name, I’ve actually been writing for many years. I still remember the times I would write lists just for the fun of it at 5 years old. I got my first taste of writing an original story at 8 years old. We were tasked with writing a story about math and that’s how the story of Zero the Hero came to be. I went on to write a book (with very short chapters, mind you) called The Haunted Mansion. Although, I eventually scrapped that project at a later date (I also couldn’t seem to find the original notebook I wrote it in). After that, I found my interest in writing starting to grow. By the age of 10, in the 5th grade, I would write and create these short comics about a team of pre-teen superheroes called the Cul Duds (Cool Dudes) with the help of a school friend, Darius Adams. I’ve since rewritten that project under a new title, Chaos Raiders. However, the years that catapulted my writing into the passion I exhibit today were 2014 and 2015. In the Spring of 2014, we did a unit on poetry in English class. I haven’t stopped writing poems ever since. In the early months of 2015, I had an epiphany. I wanted to expand the extent of my writing well beyond a single world. I wanted my characters to have a shared experience with each other in such a way that would expand the existence of their universe. I wanted to provide more for the reader to explore. This is what lead me to create The Arcane Realms. Even that escalated into something more just a decade later. It is my dream that what I spent years writing notes for, idealizing new projects and conflicts, creating new characters and tying their story to the overarching plot of their existence will come into fruition. That I will fully live this dream out and see the result of my magnum opus.