Hello and welcome. This is the
obligatory introductory post. My name is
Lucinda Preston. Or at least that's my
pen name. I chose it because of a game I
played a long time ago. It's been called
the porn star game as well as a few other things. You're supposed to take the name of your
first pet as your first name and the name of the first street you lived on as
your last name. My first pet was a cat named Lucinda. I might have been three or four when my mother's cousin gave her to us. I remember she was huge though I don't remember what color she was. Maybe gray? I remember sitting on the living room couch, watching cartoons, and her sitting beside me eating food from my hand. The food was usually either potato chips or some kind of candy. Lucinda ate everything because our cousin never had any sense according to my mother.
Preston was the street we lived on when we had Lucinda. It's the first place I remember living though it was the third house I lived in. So the name means more to me than simply something I came up with during a game. It's connected to sweet, funny, memories before darker things started happening. That's why I kept it even after reading a time or two about not using games like that to come up with pen names.
Now that you know all about my pen name, let me talk about myself. My mother is an avid reader and a writer. My father writes poetry. Two of my siblings write poetry as well. All three of them dabbled in music when they were in school. I inherited a love of writing, a passion for reading, and expanded on their interest in music. I added an addiction to sewing, making jewelry, and learning new spins on family recipes through watching too much Food Network and experimentation.
I have a degree in history, took a twelve week intensive culinary course, and love to have long drawn out conversations about politics, religion, scientific theory, and a myriad of other things. I'm still finding my place in the world, but I have my definition of myself down pretty well. I'm an artist. A poet. No matter what I do for a day job, no matter what else I'm interested in, I'll always be those two things. I've been writing since I was in middle school. That's when I wrote my first short story.
It was a vampire story about a fourteen year old girl who styled herself as a geisha. She was a virgin, but men paid her for companionship. One of her customers turns her. I still have notes from it, and related stories, so I might rewrite it one of these days. So, yes, I love vampires. Now, I research other mythological beings, the latest being kelpies, to add to my paranormal romances. Lately, I've tried to branch out from paranormal romance.
I've added historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and some horror, to my arsenal. There is adult, and young adult, in all those. Most of my plots come from dreams. I write them down in composition notebooks and let them germinate. It generally takes several months for something to become viable enough to start writing because I have to know a few things. Main characters, some sense of back story, and a general idea of where I'm going.
I'm a plotter through and through, but my outlines vary on amount of detail. Also, they're subject to change while I'm writing. If I start with no idea where I'm going, I'll quit pretty quickly. I have the unfinished manuscripts to prove it. All of them are over ten thousand words. Some are a lot longer. One of these days, I'll get back to them. For proof of finishing, I have eleven manuscripts done.
There are three historical fiction manuscripts, two paranormal romances, three fantasies, two science fiction, and one contemporary romance. Then there are the short stories. That's where the horror sneaked in. One day, I'll be brave enough to write a horror novel. I feel like I take the dreams as the thread and connect them with imaginings and events from my life to create something that feels real. It can be therapy for me, it can be frustrating, it can be a chore, it can be pure joy.
So to sum up: why do I write? Because I'm an artist. It's the simplest truth I can give.
