How Snyderon Came to be

My senior year of high school, I was what you would call a middle of the road student.  I didn't care about college really. I knew I was going to our local community college, and I also knew that I was going to training for the Army National Guard, because I had already enlisted the year prior and had to complete my split option training.  So I wasn't the best academically, to say the least. I loved FFA and agriculture, as I grew up around farming and excelled in the classes that pertained to agriculture.  FFA also gave me a platform to speak out loud without getting in trouble in class! Which was something new I hadn't experienced before. But again i knew the military would play a big role in my life, and that kind of got in the way of me pursuing even more things through FFA as a career. The only other thing in school that I was somewhat passionate about was English 4 with Ms. Olson.  She was a first year teacher and relatively strict, but she enjoyed me in her class, and I wasn't really that big of an interruption like I was in other classes throughout the school year.  No, English 4 was o k, reading was not what I enjoyed, it was the story telling.  We had the opportunity to craft stories from our own heads, and make things up as we went along, as long as we kept within the boundaries of what proper writing should look like at that age. So here I was, class clown, center of attention type child, getting to make up stories for a grade?!?!  Count me in Ms. Olson i'm the boy for the job!

Competencies were a portion of this English 4 class, where you have to write 20 or 30,  pages pertaining to different topics, and you had to write them in specific styles that were told to you before writing them.  Now, some of these competencies, I did not do well on, because they didn't spark my interest.  But for some reason when we had to write in an "old English" form, my mind exploded with ideas.  It was something I was waiting for in a sense.  A friend of mine, Sean, was in the same class as I was and we fed off of each other when it came to writing these goofy stories.  We wanted to create hilarious stories, that one upped each others.  Now, since its been a solid 13 since we were doing these writings, I do not remember any of them other than one I wrote and one Sean wrote.  So for this old English version of a story, I decided to tell the tale of a young lad traveling to a local town for a "Gathering of the Gluttons".  I climbed into my "Dodger of Rams" to travel to the town of "Kinsmonia",  to decipher this very archaic form of writing, I got in my '94 half ton, standard cab, short bed, faded maroon/pink Dodge Ram pick'em up truck, and headed to the town on Kinsman.  Very small town, outside of my even smaller town, we're talking 200 people in the town kind of small.  The only fun thing to do around here was on Wednesday night every week, Taco Night!!  The bar in Kinsman would serve tacos, and they were pretty damn good, I'm sure I have it in my head that they were better than they actually were, but either way it felt like the greatest meal of the week, since it was an extension of high school, and everyone I hung out with was usually there. I ended up writing about my father participating in this gluttony competition, or basically a form of competitive eating. But I was the challenger, now if you were to see my dad compared to me, you'd realize rather quickly, he can put down some food.  Much better than I could, especially during my senior year of high school when I was 120 pounds soaking wet.  I wrote about him eating 47 tacos while I had finished only 4, something to that effect, and ended it with "Jerry the last of the Snyderon's had been defeated."  As if I was ever an eating champion prior to this. The paper went over so well with Ms. Olson, she had me read it to the class, along with the story Sean had written. This was where Snyderon started. 

After High School, I had additional training with the National Guard, and then I was deployed to Iraq for 15 months. Once I was home though, Sean and I picked up right where we left off when it came to creative writing.  At the time I had no idea that I was in love with writing like this.  I had no real experience writing any stories other than what came out of me in those competencies, but Sean and i dove into a whole new world of writing together that i never knew existed, and it was all done on Facebook.  Sean had started it, but after awhile we took turns making up a topic, we would then comment on the original post with additional parts of the story.  We were creating chain stories, which at the time I had no idea what that was, I was just goofing around with a friend and creating something.  These stories always involved the "Old English" for of dialogue, and be set in fictional medieval worlds.  They always involved trolls, elves, evil dwarf's, and of course dragons!  I may venture to say that these stories were on par with George R.R. Martin, and possibly even Tolkien himself.  Obviously I don't think that's the actual case, but to me, at the time, it was Moby Dick. During this time of creating these wild stories, I would harass everyone in my family to read them, and if they didn't I literally went out of my way to read it to them. I distinctly remember reading a story to my entire family about an ax wielding troll on a mission to save a child from an evil elf, during our Christmas dinner.  I was ecstatic about how the story had turned out and all of the twists and turns it took.  There was also a ton of humor involved, that made it easy to follow and read.  My family was amused, and they always chuckled at them, but most of them thought it was somewhat absurd and mostly a waste of time.  This is where over time, i started to think the same thing.  Life starts to get in the way, I got busier with starting my own family, and Sean and I kind of fizzled out on writing stories.  Sean kept up on it during special events throughout the year, like birthdays or anniversaries.  That eventually ended as well, and we were left without our wild fantastical stories.

Jump a head few years and i start to become pretty close to another friend Chris.  We connected with comic books, and he really broadened my horizon on what good stories were.  He introduced me to more Kevin Smith stuff that i hadn't looked into before, gave me a ton of podcasts to listen to, and i got to talk about superheros with someone.  It was really great finding a friend like that, who shared common interests that most people in our small town area kind of look down upon as lesser books.  This friendship is where the most recent writing career of mine blossomed.  I distinctly remember the day where I was sitting in a tractor emptying wagons of corn, when Chris and i had been texting about comics and i had said, lets just write a comic book together.  He immediately texts back, yes absolutely, i'm in.  From there it took us awhile to get started, with actual writing, we brainstormed and came up with a ton of ideas but wrote nothing.  Finally we got a hold of ourselves and planned out an actual issue of a comic that we called Fourth Reich.  We plotted everything out and once we put our nose to the grind stone we hammered out the entire 52 page script in less than a month.  Now to a professional, i understand that isn’t all that fast, especially with some of these authors who are pumping out 4 books a month.  We are not that polished yet, and it was the very first thing we had ever created.  It was a phenomenal feeling having the entire script printed out ready to be drawn.  So we then started looking into putting together a pitch packet for our story.  Something we could go to a publisher with and pitch them our book.  We had about 4 or 5 pages of script drawn for us and we put the packet together. I ended up putting the script up on reddit for other peoples reviews of it, to see if things needed to be changed.  From there we felt overwhelmed by the feed back on what they claimed needed to change and we kind of froze in place after that.  They weren't negative comments by any means, but they felt like we crammed too much story within one issue, and that it moved too fast.  Looking back at it now, i feel like it needed to be that way, the story we had in mind was huge, it needed to chew through the story in order for it to move along the way it needed to.  We had A LOT of ground to cover.  Chris and i realized we may be biting off a bit more than we should.  Also, between the two of us we have had 6 kids in 6 years, i'd have a child and he would the next year, and we did that 3 more times. So life and family definitely took the priority, and writing fell to the way side.     

        Now our kids are a bit older, his youngest is one, my youngest is two.  They are becoming more manageable in a way.  We really aren't any less busy, but what we have come to realize, is our passion for writing is greater than we thought, and we need to do this together.  Which is why i started this Blog and podcast, and why Chris and I started a podcast called Snarf Talk as well.  We are using it as a platform to plot out and build our next comic book story.  We will basically be crafting a book during these episodes of the podcast.  Along with talking about writing and comics, the blog and Snyderon podcast may blend into Snarf Talk, they may have similar episodes.  But i plan on keeping them as different as I can.  Hopefully anyone reading this will go check out the podcast, and hopefully anyone checking out the podcasts will read this blog.  I'm here to help you escape for a minute and maybe take a ride in the stories I create here, to a place that makes you happy and stress free.  The world we live in today is full of unwanted stress from social media and basically all news outlets.  Why not sit back and enjoy something that is a little less serious, and a lot more entertaining.  Thanks for reading along, and I hope to have you back!