Welcome to The Storyteller’s Haunt!

I’m A. G. Swift. I’m a passionate writer, reader, artist, lover of animals and nature, and am committed to a lifetime of personal development.

I create all of the art for this blog myself. It’s digital by medium, but made with my own two hands.

my current writing projects

I am a very passionate writer, which will be evident by the amount of projects I am working on. In addition to this blog you’re reading right now, I am currently writing:

• A children’s novel about a macaw named Jersey.
• A young adult book series about a group of cats fighting to defeat a mythical cult and their feline worshippers.
• A series of flash fiction stories inspired by the works of Aesop, and Native American folklore. (the series is called Swift’s Book of Fables and is posted weekly on this blog)
• And several standard length short stories.

My Story

The name of this blog, The Storyteller’s Haunt, describes my own story in a few short words: I am the storyteller, and this is the place I come to for relief from the stories that haunt me.

Stories Drew me in like a hummingbird to flowers

Stories have been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. I enjoyed consuming literature from a very young age (my favorite was Good Night Gorilla; I ate 3 copies).

Stories drew me in like a hummingbird to flowers. During my childhood, I always spent far more time reading than I did interacting with other people. If I wasn’t reading, I was daydreaming. I was happy.

4-year-old me took that as a challenge

When I was little, my favorite movie was Spirit; Stallion of the Cimarron. I would watch it over and over again, even after I knew every scene and line by heart.

There was one quote at the beginning that really stuck with me “This is a story that cannot be found in a book.” 4-year-old me took that as a challenge.

I grabbed a stack of printer paper, stapled one side together, and got to work. I was 6 pages in when I realized it was too big of a project for me to complete. And it wasn’t turning out the way I had imagined it.

Disappointed, I gave up and went back to reading.

My sister and I decided to write a book together

When I was 9, my sister and I decided to write a book together. It was a grand idea about a herd of mustang horses. But about a week in, we realized that our idea didn’t have as much plot as we thought. So we decided to give up that idea and move on.

To be an author, one must get published

This time quitting hurt more. I had really believed that we were going to get somewhere, that one day, we would see that book in print on the bookshelf.

But after that project fell through, I came to the conclusion that I would never be an author, no matter how much I wanted to be.

Because to be an author, one must get published.

I didn’t know much about the publishing industry, but it seemed so far away, so unreachable unless one had connections and money.

I was about as broke as any 9-year-old, and didn’t know how to talk to people outside of my own family. I thought that if I didn’t already know anyone by then, I didn’t stand a chance.

The desire to write never left me

The desire to write never left me, but I largely ignored it as it simmered under the surface.

As a teen, that all changed when I stumbled into the world of fanfiction. I wrote several works of my own.

And then I discovered something that changed everything for me: self-publishing.

It was a completely new idea to me, and that rabbit hole or research led me to learn about the many facets and possibilities that exist for publishing.

No method was perfect, none would be easy, but I finally had something to hope for.

I started to write again, and this time the story came to me easily.

The story came alive in my hands

At that time, I was knee deep in my obsession with parrots. So naturally, I searched for novels with parrots as the main characters. I couldn’t find a single one (unless you could a shapeshifter, which I don’t). So I decided to write the story I wanted to read.

I didn’t have a computer at the time, so I got a lined notebook and wrote in there. It was infuriating. I filled a handful of pages, but if I misspelled something or write a sentence weird, it was there to stay (staring at me menacingly every time I opened that book).

So I got a second notebook to fix the mistakes, because they had the power to steer me away from writing because I couldn’t stop thinking about the. And it worked! Until I learned about syntax and grammar, and I realized that this wasn’t going to work.

Eventually I did get access to a computer, and boy did that change everything. No more sore hands, no more unfixable mistakes, no more ripped or stained pages. I was actually making progress.

The story came alive in my hands. The more I worked, the more excited I got. Inspiration would come to me out of nowhere. It felt as if these characters were real; their ghosts whispering their life story into my ears.

and then I lost momentum

And then I lost momentum. I hit a place in my life as a whole that led to some serious burnout and emotional instability (thank you, teenage hormones). The things I loved couldn’t help me anymore. I felt numb, but with a longing that couldn’t be helped by anyone or anything.

I started to spiral and I couldn’t stop.

At my darkest point, I had decided that stories were a distraction. They weren’t going to help me. I feared that I was naïve and confused; most of my understanding of the world and people came from fiction.

The stories haunted me

I decided to quit. No writing, no reading, and no daydreaming. Get back to reality and grow up. I had to watch my thoughts constantly, and I realized just how much I used stories to understand the world around me. It had to stop (and in doing so, I felt like I had finally broken something inside me).

The stories haunted me. Always there, whispering of lived never lived, showing vivid images of things never seen. Sleep brought the stories though my dreams; those I couldn’t block out, though I tried so hard.

Every day got harder and harder. I gave everything I could, but the stories just wouldn’t die. 3 months of this passed before I finally broke; this wasn’t a fight I could win.

I gave in and I started to write

I gave in and I started to write. I let myself think freely again, and I let the stories in.

But the haunting never stopped.

I guess the stories felt threatened by my assassination attempt. It had been a mental battle of endurance and starvation, and the stories had won.

But now they wanted more than my mere surrender. They wanted everything; my mind, my time, my loyalty. And they weren’t going to take no for an answer.

Writing anything at all was enough at first, but the strongest, most insistent need to do more built up over time.

My thoughts are always on the stories

My thoughts are always on the stories or on keeping them at bay. If ignored, they keep me awake at night until I write. My hands want for a pencil or keyboard whenever they stand empty. And the inspiration just keeps flowing in like a flood.

A ravenous, unquenchable hunger that I alone have been tasked to feed.

I won’t judge this as a good or bad thing, life is far too complex for that, and I’ve done this to myself. But it’s not quite the image I had in mind when I imagined myself a writer at 4 years old.

I write because of the stories that haunt me

Everyone has a drive or reason for why they create; I write because of the stories that haunt me.

Welcome to The Storyteller’s Haunt.

A. G. Swift