Today we’d like to introduce you to Desi D.

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Hi Desi, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.

As a child, I loved movies and cartoons with dark themes. I loved horror movies and have always had a dark imagination which is reflected in my work today. Looking back, I can see now stories have always been a part of who I am, but it took a long time for me to realize I wanted to be an author. This is because writing never came easy to me and even now, I am second-guessing my sentence structures. I went to college to get a Bachelor’s in English in creative writing and an MFA in writing popular fiction to be able to share my stories. It has been an uphill struggle because I never instinctively understood grammar and being dyslexic hasn’t helped.

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Stories have gotten me through a lot of difficult times by allowing me to escape and examine characters’ problems which are always worse than mine. To see them face challenges and the unfairness of life, and still want to be decent people in their own twisted ways, has helped me keep my problems in perspective. Stories allow us to escape into the magic of the what-if, to see characters overcome obstacles that (hopefully) we will never encounter. They give us a safe place to grow and challenge our understanding of the world we live in and by the end of it, we realize our lives are much more manageable. That is at least what I hope people will take from my stories and the struggles my characters face.

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We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?

It has not been a smooth road; life likes to throw curve balls.

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Some of the life struggles I’ve faced are living with hereditary multiple exostoses aka hereditary multiple osteochondromas, being dyslexic, struggles with depression, my mother’s passing when I was 21 from breast cancer, and my dad passed away 8 years ago from a lot of health problems.

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Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?

I am an author and college instructor for English Comp I & II. I specialize in writing dark speculative fiction and my short story If I Shall Wake was published in the award-winning Terror at 5280’ anthology. I am currently in the final revision stages of my debut novel Bound by Crystals: The Cost of Perception and I will finish it in the next few months. I love the art of writing. I’m proud that I stuck with it through all my hardships and now, I get to share this passion with my students and through my stories.

 

What sets me apart from other creatives is my journey to my craft and the twisted characters who inhabit my stories that come from my dark imagination. This is one of the greatest parts about being creative is knowing that each of us is unique and this is reflected in our work.

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Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?

I personally don’t believe in luck.

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I do believe in divine guidance and that the world we live in is unfair. I have had my share of hard times, but I wouldn’t call them bad luck but instead challenges to overcome. Many of which I wish I didn’t have to face, but all of them make me who I am today. I’ve also had great opportunities presented in front of me which I see as divine intervention and guidance.