If the Past, Present and Future are happening at the same time...(if Albert Einstein's theory is true)...then when I was born, the invention that I invented as an adult already existed! Maybe I just tapped into the Universe's library of ideas and made it my own? I have no idea, but I do feel like I was meant to develop a writing system...and now, in 2014, it is no longer my own, but owned by the whole world and used all over the world...that was my dream and it has come true. I thank the Universe!
Looking back, I realize there were four necessary influences that came together in my formative years, that inspired me...
1. the love of dance, mime and visual arts
2. the excitement over animation techniques, stimulated by Disney
3. the desire to improve our world inspired by my family
4. and the natural-born desire to write and publish books
The latter one, number 4 above, is odd. I believe I was born with that desire...to design and publish books. Can that be genetic? Ha!
There were hints of book-publishing in my early childhood - small things - that surprise me, when I look back. I had forgotten about my early childhood, until one day I found my old childhood artwork and writings and childhood dance photos. These old writings and photos revealed the same person, just a younger version of me...(smile ;-)
You see, today, the SignWriting Script, a section of Sutton Movement Writing, is a way to read and write the movements of sign languages. SignWriting is a "movement-writing-alphabet" that provides symbols for writing how we "pronounce" or "produce" or "perform" the movements - It is an alphabet because we are writing "pronunciation" like other alphabets do, except we are not pronouncing sounds, but instead pronouncing body movement used in sign languages. Sign languages are real languages used by millions of people on a daily basis. The SignWriting Script is acknowleged as one of the world's scripts by the ISO, the International Bureau of Standardization, and has been called a "Featural Alphabet", compared to Hangul, the Korean Alphabet, which is also Featural.
So my life has been dedicated to developing a new kind of alphabet, and publishing books teaching this new alphabet.
When I was between age 4-6, I created little books. When I found two of these little books in a pile of old papers, I marveled at them. How could I have forgotten that I was publishing books on alphabets back at a young age? Once I saw the little books, I remember where I sat in our home in Corning, New York, while I was creating these little booklets, and I remember feeling very inspired because I wanted to "publish" books on the alphabet!
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Of course at the time, I was referring to the English alphabet, but, nonetheless, the first book I ever put together was entitled the "Alfbat Book, Book 1". This is particularly comical, because later, as an adult, my first REAL published book, at age 23, had the words "Book One " on the cover of the book (see below). It was teaching the beginnings of Sutton DanceWriting...which later lead to the SignWriting alphabet: |
