Who am I? For starters, I'm a chronic over thinker. And for people like me, that means I can never seem to find a happy medium between divulging waaaay too much and annoying myself, or erring on the side of mysterious and not giving enough. The struggle is real with writing introductions, so that means this one is probably going to tip toward the former.
Though it's a current trend for my family to deny it, there’s a birth certificate in my mother’s closet that states that I was, in fact, born in Glendale, California. Can't say I remember much of it, only brief flashes of things that I’m not sure are memories, dreams, or hallucinations that my brain meshed together based on baby photos and old stories. Either way, that glamourous blip of time lasted about one-and-a-half years before my parents traded earthquakes and wildfires for the northern Rocky Mountains. They found a comfy spot in the lush pines north of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, where I currently reside today.
My real name is Britt, but I write under the name Imogen Isles. With pseudonyms, I'm not quite sure how introductions should work, so call me Britt or B or Imogen or whatever you prefer. I'm pretty much guaranteed to answer to anything with a half-dazed "what?".
I definitely blame—or credit, I should say—my parents for who I am today. The daughter of a mother with a massive family (seven siblings for her), and an almost Rockstar (if you want a glimpse into my parents’ lives pre-me, watch both Almost Famous and Rockstar). My upbringing, coupled with living in the middle of nowhere and being surrounded by mountains, I was pretty much destined to be an artist. Marked at birth to be a creator by words or paint or pen.
My first love was pen (crayon, if we're getting technical). Sketching. Painting. Crafting. All the art things tangible and textured. I enjoyed drawing as a creative outlet. Spent my spare time (and let’s be honest, most of my school time) drawing all the creatures and winged things I could. My notebooks were filled with dragons and poor imitations of cartoon characters that would later turn into an obsession with Disney and Cowboy Bebop.
I found words at the age of twelve. Until then, I’d been a sporadic reader. Going through phases where I would devour books like Butterfingers. Consecutively consuming them until the bag was empty, and once gone, wouldn’t touch another until the following Halloween. So, I read. Inconsistently, but I did. I spent most my summers with my Grandma, who was an avid reader. In an attempt to connect with her, I read every book she did (basically the entire James Patterson catalogue—Roses are Red was the first vampire book I ever read).
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I enjoyed the sounds of words the most, the musicality in them when strung together just right (cue a classic obsession with Poe, Byron, and Shakespeare). That’s when I started to write, without really realizing I was writing. I wish I could say I started with awful, cheesy poems about cats or crushes or how annoying my little brothers were, but I didn’t. I started out with acting (I’m fighting the urge to call it verbal writing, but I don’t know how I feel about that yet).
Instead of playing on the playgrounds or joining a violent game of kickball during recesses, my best friend and I would claim our spot in the corner of the school yard and well, act. We’d each create a character and press play, feeding off of each line or emotion or pantomime. Most of it was dialogue, but we also exercised our imaginations with descriptions of settings and tones and all the tertiary characters we could manage. Most of what we acted out was a continuation of whatever we’d done the day before. We’d transform from talking animals into mafia henchmen (as if we actually understood the concept of henchmen) into whatever random thing we chose next. We did this every day until we graduated primary school, and then throughout summer when we’d alternate sleepovers. Even when seventh grade hit, we wanted to continue our lunchtime tradition, but we were teenagers then and the outside campus brimmed with shiny new boys.
So we grew up. Or tried to. But that creative bug was always biting at our heels. We’d watch movies, read books, and get hooked on new shows that we desperately wanted to immerse ourselves in. To this day, I don’t know who’s idea it was first, but we grabbed a fresh notebook and fleshed out our previous characters. The dogs became people, the world became a nameless city, and all of those tertiary characters (though admittedly, they were still rooted in Yu-Gi-Oh) became gang members with motivations and goals.
And I don’t know if it had the title of Fanfiction back then, but that’s essentially what we were doing: creating Fanfiction.
We’d swap the notebook between classes, plot and write together at lunch. By the end of Junior High, we had eight-plus notebooks overflowing with our story, threading together elements from all of our favorite things (Yu-Gi-Oh, Buffy, and so, so many early 2000’s movies starring The Rock). We also took on pseudonyms, just in case any foreign eyes landed on the stories. My friend wrote as Sir Lancelot and I as Sir Galahad (hey, hey Monty Python).
As all things do, the story ended as we grew apart. She devoted herself to sports and I delved back into the physical side of art, picking back up my paintbrushes and Prisma pencils. While I focused on my outlet as a physical artist, words were always a part of me. I started reading again. Some of them were assigned that I honestly despised (here’s looking at you, Frankenstein), and some I skimmed and claimed I loved (sorry, Wuthering Heights). At fifteen, my obsession with Poe overrode my obsession with Shakespeare, which then moved to Byron and then, finally Jane Austen. Between these reads, I was crafting stories. A lot of which were fantasies around fairies, jousting sorcerers, and a plot eerily similar to King Arthur.
While these were fun to work on, they were never enough to fully move me. I’d lose interest after five chapters and hop to the next project in my head. It wasn’t until I read both The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and Teach Me by R.A. Nelson that I remembered what drew me to words in the first place. Sound. Poetry. Angst.
I wanted to recreate all of it. Turn myself into melted butter.
At sixteen, I wrote and completed my first novel. There's only been one draft of it. Capping at maybe thirty-thousand words, if I stretched it. It was thirty-thousand words of a story that I finished. It was cheesy and so, so terrible. But, it was done and it was mine.
I wrote my second novel, an unrelated and totally Twilight-inspired plot, at nineteen. Since I handwrote the entire thing in pink pen, I couldn’t tell you the word count on it, but it was the first incarnation of Thread, the story that birthed my Perennial Chaos universe (the same universe used in my AMM novel). I fell in love with it and those characters. They’ve both been gutted and rewritten a thousand times, but I’m still in love with all of it. It took me a long while to find the characters and a story that really spoke through them (I've finally figured it out, and they're my next project after AMM).
Around that time, I had been introduced to an online writing site called Wattpad. I honestly can't recall what I had expected from it, if anything at all, but what I can tell you is that it kind of changed my life. By this point, I'd been writing sporadically for nearly ten years. I never took it seriously, or myself, or really committed to an art form. Joining the website was the first time I'd ever really put myself out there. It was a challenge. There were suddenly readers holding me accountable for completing a story when the only person I had yelling at me before WP was myself.
As I worked on too many projects at once, I met an incredible group of talented writers who felt the same as I did. Writing had become my catharsis. Even now, If I'm not writing, I'm not pleasant. Basically, I suffer from the writer's version of hangry. What's the word for that? Wrangry? Madderly? Eh, I'll come back to that one.
We bonded over shared interests and writing styles and honestly, without them, my writing would not be where it is today. They've supported me, helped me grow and thrive and realize the things I want from life. The things I can accomplish. We've travelled from Seattle to London together and seen each other through a lot of life changes, whether that was family or career or whatever else. I'm a firm believer that our journeys through life are not being travelled alone, and having them by my side has changed the course of mine for the better.
With their help, I've completed my third novel, and if all goes well, it will be my first submission for Author Mentor Match. I'm so excited about this program and I have to shout out to my hammies for stepping up and helping me during this entire process.
There's a quote by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) that has always stuck with me:
I wholeheartedly believe this to be true. And I know this because the story I'm submitting would not have manifested the way it has if not for them. I can't wait to see what the future holds.
If you've made it this far, I applaud you for sticking it through! But to be fair on my part, I did give warning that this would be a long one.