I’ve always been into the storytelling process, since early childhood. With Sesame Street I taught myself to read at a very young age, though I don’t know when I started making up my own stories. My mom found a homework assignment from 2nd grade, I think, in which I vowed that I would grow up to write all kinds of books for all kinds of people. I imagined I’d just crank out stories to appeal to all interests, handing them out upon request like a sidewalk hot dog cart. I had no concept of publishing companies back then.

It was around this time I was waking up to my giantess fantasies, in fact, but it never occurred to me back then to write those dreams and imaginings out on paper. I wonder what those would have sounded like? I’d had two dreams about gigantic women then, so I guess I could only have transcribed the action in those scenes. And then torn them apart or something, so no one could find them. If my mom didn’t discover them under my bed (and subsequently demand to know what was meant by them), my younger brother would surely have turned them in to her, elated at the potential for getting me in trouble.

It’s so strange I never made that connection, when my babysitters would sequester me to my bedroom because they didn’t feel like dealing with me, and my primary form of self-entertainment was to draw (which I stopped, once my little brother started doing it), make up newspapers (that’s when it dawned on me how little I knew about the world around me), and write comics. Given that many of those babysitters also factored into my giantess fantasies, why did it never occur to me to write short stories about them? How far removed is that from a holiday wish list, explaining what I want, what it means to me and why I deserve it? Do that in a story form and you’re halfway to a reasonable giantess fantasy.

My parents introduced me to AD&D in middle school. I’m sure they had no idea what it was, they’d just heard some buzz about it and knew it was the trendy thing for certain kinds of kids. And given that I’d displayed a deep and irredeemable lack of aptitude at soccer and baseball—never attempted football—they probably figured an indoor fantasy storytelling game was more up my alley. In high school I got my own word processor, and I used this to design my own character sheets, and I used those basically as character templates for stories. I rolled up their stats and legitimately bought what equipment I could for them, with what little gold an adventurer starts out with. But this was just the springboard for a complex background story and an outline for their destiny. The more in-depth I got with these PCs, the more the world around them grew, developing its own history, rival cities, rich coastlines with colonies and trading ports, then exotic continents dedicated to real-world analogue cultures or habitats for specific creatures and races, bringing world mythology into it. I rarely played AD&D at all, but I had accordion folders jammed with all the characters waiting to leap into action. After I got out of the military and college, these all went into recycling but I still remember the idealistic passion I felt during their creation.

We moved around a lot for various reasons, and my childhood was unstable and inconstant. I did learn how people tend to develop in patterns, and there are templates of people that repeat from city to city, though I have no childhood friends, no one I’ve known my whole life outside of family. In one of these temporary homes, there was a tool shed in the back yard. I used it as a little fort, of course, an instinctual need for boys. I’d explore the sparse woods beside our property, dressed like Indiana Jones, listening to Duran Duran’s Rio (the most exotic music I owned) on my little boombox, and I tried to embody the role of an adventurer breaking into new geography and unknown biomes altogether. Then I’d retreat to my fort and use old sheets of tarpaper and cardboard to chart the maps of the alien continents I’d explored. I carefully marked the danger zones and the cryptic landmarks of bygone civilizations, and I’d go out and explore some more.

One time I came home from school and found the shed door open. My brother and his friend had come in to discover my collection of maps and scrolls, and they’d pissed all over them. That took the wind out of my sails. I probably gave him a brotherly beating-up for it, but leaving the artifacts of my imagination in the shed like that made me vulnerable, I realized, and I took the criticism of a preteen’s mocking urination very badly. Critics are like that: they only feel good about themselves if they can remove the joy from someone else’s craft. Still, I should’ve had the strength of conviction to continue undeterred, just because it was something I loved to do. I’ve always been susceptible to outside influence, particularly the negative kind. Other people seem much more resistant to this than I’ve always been.

There was another time in school when I was… this was probably related to AD&D as well. They’d appropriated enough Egyptian mythology to sound credible and had gone into some detail on hieroglyphics, rough and serviceable translations, &c. I loved the concept and decided to explore designing my own. I toyed with a graphic written expression of square-based glyphs that contained small events or feelings—e.g., a sketch of a flood, a representation of civic unrest—and combinations of these could communicate eras of history. There was no set pattern to the glyphs, they were unique to the author, and I had fun with it. I’m sure no outsider who picked up a sheet of these symbols could ascertain exactly what I was trying to relate, but they might understand that something was being expressed and grasp parts of it.

Curious to see whether it meant anything, this instinct of mine, I showed it to my teacher at school and explained it. She was delighted and immediately turned it into a class project, which I hadn’t anticipated. I explained the concepts to my class, and the only thing I recall of this was the looks of confusion and irritation on the popular kids’s faces. I have no recollection of whether anyone else thought it was a good idea or enjoyed it at all. And I’m sure the entire exercise solidified in my classmates’s minds that I was some alien kind of freak who could never fully tune into the real world. I knew nothing about sports and I wasn’t aware of popular music; I was into Star Wars but everyone was. Didn’t count.

I still pursued world-building in AD&D into college, showing extra interest in sociology and geology courses. I draw up maps of continents, charting wind patterns and designing calendars based on the eccentricities of orbit. I’ve only waded into conlang but have the basic principles down. Rather than charting out PC sheets for my characters, I have in-depth interview forms I can use for them and have no problem writing never-to-be-seen short stories and vignettes to try them out as living, viable characters. Eventually in college, after RPing with “giantesses” on Telnet, I was inspired to write an acquaintance’s girlfriend into a GTS fantasy, and then I began writing size-fetish fiction in earnest. I still do need lots of encouragement and support, however, even though I’m supposed to produce this stuff simply because I love it. Create the world you want to live in, you know. And I have loftier plans for worlds and settings in this genre that I’ll probably never get to, but I haven’t abandoned these ideas entirely, not yet.