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I like technology. In fact, I like it alot. But I'm no expert. Just someone who has a fascination with mechnical and electronic things who always wants to learn more. And hey, I like BubbleGum Crisis (japanese anime series) alot too, but again I'm no expert. Still, nobody is born an expert, so we have to learn, and the only way to learn is by mistakes. Er, well you can also try gathering information about your chosen area of interest too! :) So after asking a few people via the internet what they thought about a tech database for Bubblegum Crisis, and getting a several-thumbs-up, I created the Raven's Garage website. I eventually bought the domain name ravensgarage.com. 10 years went by (it felt like 5) and due to my growing list of non-anime related hobbies I figured it would be nice to make a separate website for said hobbies. But I needed another domain name... Hmm, I seem to get inspired to write whenever it rains so how about rainycitynights.com? Simple as that. No, really! So that's the exciting story of how my little website empire started ;) Anyway, my name is Andy Skuse, and I live in a little village in Canada called London. I work as a service technician
at a local Apple computer store, and among other things, I rescue old Macintosh computers in
my spare time, much to the dismay of most of my Windows using friends ;)
I like to write a lot too, but I never seem to have as much time to devote to writing as I wish I had. I started
writing in high school but never took it seriously until about October 1995 when I started working on a fanfiction
story called Bubblegum Cross. BGC
fanfic Editor extraordinaire Jeanne Hedge helped me immensely in those early formative years. Using BG cross as a tool
to hone my skills I eventually started in on original stories, and I am currently researching a couple of original
stories I'd like to try and get published someday. One story is a kind of a techno/murder-mystery/spy story set in the
not too distant future, while the other is a classic sword and sorcery tale focusing on a young man's quest to find a
princess, but first he has to get past the Dragon's Tower. And when I am not writing I am usually working on this website
or jamming with my long-time band-mates in the band My Weekly Crime.
Making music used to be my first love, and I was lucky enough to play in several bands over the years with some very talented people. Most of the time the band would start off with alot of energy but then fall apart due to schedule issues or opposing opinions about what music we should play. But I was lucky enough to accomplish 2 of my goals; to record a demo and play live on stage. But the current music trends have passed me by and I seem stuck in the 80's music-wise as my friends are kind enough to point out frequently. I still plunk away on my guitar and keyboard occasionally, getting inspired enough to stay up way too late just to get an idea down. I know the flame of inspiration is still there, but it just doesn't burn quite so brightly any more. Part of getting older I guess. But as I get older, I look forward to other things, like more time to write. Writing is more than just a hobby for me. While I hope someday to pursue a writing career more fully, at the moment I'm really having a lot of fun just learning how to write. And the best way to do that is simply to write. I really enjoy the craft of writing; trying a new technique, modifying an old technique, shaping a paragraph this way and that until it is just right. And it is always intriguing to read a book and see how the author put his or her words together, and to try and understand how the author provoked me to feel something. And I love to read about writers and how they work. Their daily routine, their idiosyncracies, and their superstitions. The more I understand, the more I want to see. So when did I start writing? I actually started to write with some kind of attention to detail back in high school. I can remember one particular short fantasy story I wrote called "The Witch of Radamanthus", and the teacher's comment: "these are some powerful images Andy. Did you write all of these?". At the time I took it as a compliment, not realizing he was asking me if I had plagiarized! I wasn't offended though. I can't seem to stay angry about anything for longer than a few hours. But after several other short stories being handed in, and encouragement from other less suspicious english teachers, I started to enjoy just writing for myself. About this same time I got into playing guitar, and after a while the two interests began to merge. I still have a book of all the lyrics I wrote back then, most of them horrible rock n' roll type things. "I lost you, and then I found you, but then we both got lost and now I can't find me". You know what I am talking about here. But I was also really inspired by the band Rush, and I experimented with longer and more fantasy oriented lyrics, one of which was the inspiration for The Dark Traveller. Traveller started off as a 5 part, twenty minute song about a young man who's spirit seeks revenge after he and his father were killed while living with a mining colony on Saturn. Yeah, I know, sounds pretty corny, like Iron Maiden might have had something to do with it. But due to time constraints while recording the song, the 20 minute opus was reduced to 5 minutes. I really like how the song ended up, but it's fun to listen to the demo tapes to hear the other 15 minutes of the song. Iron Maiden had nothing to fear. The recording I refer to above took place in 1997 (click here to listen to the demo by TOWER), but my creative energies had already begun to shift away from lyric writing to short stories. I don't remember how, but I managed to come across something on the internet called the Fanfic Mailing List... More to come... Andy - July 22 1999 (Updated Nov 2007) 
 Pics from my trip to Anime Central '99. The Fanfiction Panel: Jeanne Hedge, con-guide extraordinaire, and co-author for Into The Shadows, and Bert Van Vliet, author of BGZone and suspected member of the Canadian Anime Otaku Underground. |