text: The Guild: A Ruthless Beginning
  
  Whereupon I mentally abuse myself into creating something due to depression, peer pressure, and hypochondria. And it turns out way less crappy than you'd think!
  
  The Guild is a comedy web series I created in 2006 about a group of online gamers and how they interact online and offline. (Not autobiographical at all. Nope.) Before I made the show, my writing career consisted of one sketch comedy class, a half-finished movie script, and some creepy fan fiction I wrote as a kid. Yes, even creepier than my video game poetry. Which was pretty damned creepy.
  
  I'd always wanted to write. But in order to try something in life, you probably have to be exposed to someone who makes you think, Whoa. I want to be cool like them! Everyone knows "cool" is the ultimate life motivator, for better or worse. "Tattoo around the belly button where my skin stretches a ton eventually? Let's do it!" When I was growing up, my dad read a ton of science fiction, my aunt was an actor, my brother could fart and burp loudly, and all these things I aspired to do because I felt they'd make me a more bitchin' human being. Unfortunately, no one around was like, "I'm writing a short story about unicorns who fly spaceships!" or other brilliant ideas like that, so I didn't try picking up a pen for a long time.
  
  Even though I didn't get to practice writing as a kid, I was an expert at consuming OTHER people's writing and daydreaming about it. The first book that made me think, I wanna get inside this character's life like a pod person was Anne of Green Gables. I'd seen the miniseries on the Disney Channel (which I hated most of the time because, MAN, were girls dumb and painted pink on there), and it made me track down every single one of the books in the series and read them a dozen times over.
  
  The books inspired me to embrace being as weird as I wanted to be. Because it worked for Anne. I mean, she was also an annoying kid who talked too much and was uppity for her station, and everyone in the books thought she was adorable! At the heart of it, Anne was a fellow redhead I could admire. She and that girl, Khrystyne Haje from Head of the Class. Yeah, it's superficial, but hair color identification is SUPER important. That's why I always think, Where's the redhead one, jerks?! when I see those rows of stupid blonde dolls in the toy aisles. (That American Doll phenomenon is super weird to adult me, but I'd have torn someone apart to get one as a kid. I bet one day they'll 3-D print them up to make literal doppelgängers. That'll be terrifying/amazing, and I'll be there to buy mine on day one! Uh... for my future daughter, of course. Ahem.)
  
  My fandom about the Green Gables series was serious business. I prayed every night for my eyes to turn greener. I planned on naming my children Anne and Gilbert, which could have been awkward, seeing as they were married in the books. I put on my life's bucket list: "Move to Canada because Prince Edward Island is certainly the most WONDROUS place on the planet."
  
  I daydreamed about BEING Anne. Traipsing through nineteenth-century meadows, reciting Romantic poetry (Keats was my fave, because he died with such gruesome panache.) One day, I started creating my own original scenarios of Anne doing her plucky orphan thing. But I didn't want to deal with the annoying stuff from old-timey days, like sexism and polio, so I moved up the timeline and transported her into modern life as a free-spirited teen heiress. I'd imagine Anne flying to Hong Kong on her private jet, or spying on Communists while she performed gymnastics for the US Olympic Team. Or simple things, like attending a new high school where she'd enter a classroom wearing designer jeans and everyone would gasp at how pretty she was. "Her hair is so long and red. Can I be her best friend immediately?"
  
  I started throwing in other characters from other books into my headspace, and pretty soon I'd built an imaginary town filled with stolen IP. Perry Mason was there (of course), the whole crew from the Trixie Belden children's mystery series (Anne loved to steal Trixie's boyfriend away), Lancelot and Guinevere owned the local garden store, even anthropomorphic pigs and spiders from Charlotte's Web were full residents with voting rights. It got so complicated I had to start tracking my world in an accounting ledger with everyone's names, addresses, and personality traits in neat little rows. ("Friendly!" "Secret lovers!" "Murderer!") My town had it all!
  
  I'd love to say that the stories I conjured up were deep and fraught with intellectual themes, but they were not. They were straight out of Gossip Girl. Anne would arrive in town with a bang, and everyone would want to be friends with her. It helped that she was an orphan who'd been left billions (à la Richie Rich) and had no adult supervision. She drove a Porsche and owned a mansion with white Corinthian columns where she threw parties every night. It had an arcade AND a bowling alley. She was such a baller.
  
  Natch, all the cute guy characters wanted to date her. Including Perry Mason and a grown-up Tom Sawyer, for some reason. Everyone referred to her as "Anne with an e," and if asked: "No last name. Like Cher." My utopian alternate world lasted a good six months until my mom discovered my census account ledger hidden beneath clothes in my closet.
  
  One day I walked in on her gathering up laundry in my room. The fact that she was cleaning was shocking enough, but then... I saw what was in her hands. Oh my God. My ledger!?!
  
  "Oh baby, is this your writing? Do you want to be a writer? We should get you lessons, let me see!" The slow-motion horror of her opening my notebook and starting to turn a page felt like ripping my own skin off with a potato peeler.
  
  "MOM! That's mine, stop!" I grabbed the notebook and sprinted away, trying to find the nearest bonfire to get rid of the evidence. There wasn't one around because it was July and I was inside an actual house, so I searched for somewhere else to stash my shame.
  
  I called out over my shoulder. "They're just math problems! Can I clean your bedroom? Wash the car? Make me your slave and be distracted, please!" I shoved my ledger under the dog bed as she rounded the living room corner, praying I'd been fast enough to dodge her eye line.
  
  I was so embarrassed. I love my mom, but she has a habit of ignoring personal boundaries. She'd have no qualms about barging in the bathroom while I was bathing and say, "You need to shave your legs, honey, you look like a bear down there!"
  
  Thankfully, my mom didn't have a bizarre impulse to wash the dog bed, so my notebook remained undiscovered. But her unearthing of my alt world shut down all enthusiasm I had for the project.
  
  And in retrospect it was probably for the best, because I was starting to add TV characters to the ledger at that point. Joey Gladstone from Full House and Anne had gotten involved in a caper with a chambermaid that was... it was just becoming odder as I got older, even by my authorial standards. The next morning I got up at the crack of dawn, grabbed the ledger, and dumped it into the trash can. As I closed the lid, I said good-bye to Anne. "Have fun in Cabo with Jason Bourne! Don't worry, you'll protect him from the neo-Nazis with your Krav Maga. I imagined it, so it definitely happened."
  
  [ Let's Try That Whole "Writing" Thing Again ]
  
  Fast-forward to adulthood, when I decided to revisit the idea of writing by taking a comedy sketch class in Los Angeles. Motivation? I was bored, and that's what Hollywood actors do. Take classes. And have coffee with other actors to complain about their agents.
  
  It's a hard life.
  
  I enrolled at the ACME Comedy Theatre in 2005 with a dozen other people who, I was sure, were 5,000 percent better writers than me. The year before, I'd started writing a screenplay because the "original screenplay" Oscar acceptance speech that year had been stirring and made me think, I could do that! (The speech, not the screenplay.) But the results of my work were, er... semi-mortifying.
  
  Amendment: No "semi" about it. The script was mortifying.
  
  I wrote about a girl named "Harper Jessamyn" who was graduating from college music school and couldn't decide what to do with her life.