Bex Aaron

Bex Aaron (July 27, 1982 - ) is the benevolent creator of the Independence Day series. While this is her first series of books, digital or otherwise, she's been writing fiction since the age of ten and songs since the age of eleven. She has been writing serials since the early 1990s and previously wrote a long-running webseries entitled Behind Closed Doors.

Early life:
Bex was born in 1982, to an amazing mother. She was raised in the suburb of Channelview, Texas and displayed a knack for storytelling early on by telling dramatic lies. One such example was the time she tried to coerce her mother to stop smoking by telling her that a kindergarten classmate's mother had died from her addiction to cigarettes...and had been buried in the school sandbox. Clearly, she was always a bit morbid, even as a kid.

Throughout her childhood, Bex dreamed of one thing: fame. Influenced by the cartoon Jem, she decided at the age of five to become a rock star. By the time her teens rolled around, she'd dyed her hair pink and was singing in church on a regular basis -- it appeared she was well on her way. Stardom in that capacity was not in the cards, however.

Bex dropped out of school in ninth grade, due to bullying and other issues. She went back to school in 2001, at the age of nineteen, and earned her GED. She got her first computer (a Windows 3.1 laptop) a month later, as a graduation present.

Early Works and the Original ID:
Inspired by soap operas, Bex wrote her first serial, entitled The Break of Dawn, when she was ten years old. It centered around a miserable group of people, who all suffered terrible fates. The original manuscript has long since been lost, and Bex considers it a minor miracle that she can no longer remember some of the more regrettable plotlines.

Her next serial was entitled Montana Skies, and it had far more staying power. She began writing it when she was eleven, and continued to do so until she was fifteen. The cast of characters was no less miserable than the first, and the stories were no less convoluted. Over time, Bex became bored with the project, which led her to try her hand at two "side projects", just for a change of pace.

The first was entitled The Darker Path, and it centered on a series of murders in small town Wyoming. This, obviously, was the original version of the Independence Day series. Bex wrote this in the Spring-Summer of 1997, when she was fourteen years old. Fifty chapters (then referred to as "episodes") were written, before the series limped to a miserable conclusion. Shortly thereafter, Bex returned to Montana Skies, but soon found herself growing restless again.

Behind Closed Doors:
Bex describes December 3, 1997 as the day that changed her life forever. It was that night, on a green sheet of notebook paper, that she wrote out the original outline for the second of her "side projects", Behind Closed Doors. It was a humble beginning, with only a list of names and a title, but within the next few months, the story became her whole world.

Centering on a record label in the mid-1980s, BCD was a vast departure from her earlier, soap operatic serials. The characters were far more than just rock stars. They were husbands, wives, friends and people. Bex heralds the summer of 1998, in which she spent countless hours delving into her new cast of characters, as the best time of her life. She also credits BCD with teaching her how to write.

Within a few months of penning the first episode, it became clear that BCD had become an obsession. The thought of ending it was unbearable to Bex, so she opted to shelve Montana Skies indefinitely to focus on her new creation. 972 episodes of Behind Closed Doors were written, the vast majority of them being by hand. She also wrote several songs to go along with the series, as most of the characters were musicians. Originally, BCD was kept private, but in 2003, Bex made the decision to bring it to the internet, and its days as a webseries began. For the next three years (the last three years of its life), BCD played out on a website and Bex's writing reached a more broad audience than ever before. Real life began to take a toll, however, and in the summer of 2006, Bex made the painful decision to shelve Behind Closed Doors to focus on what was more important.

She would like to finish it one day, as the characters are still a very big part of her.

Reviving Haven Park:
In the spring of 2009, Bex decided to return to her creative roots by reviving her long ago murder mystery. The result is the series on which this site is based. However, since the original was long-lost, and the ideas contained therein were cliched at best, she deemed it best to start all over on the story. She went to work evaluating the characters who were strongest, and cut out the rest, tightening the plot and reimagining some elements altogether. The result is what she considers her strongest work to date.

Independence Day premiered as a webseries on July 4, 2009 and the first edition of book one was published on Kindle on April 20, 2011. Bex feels she has grown so much as a writer and a person with this project, just as she did with Behind Closed Doors -- and as with BCD, cannot imagine ending it. She's pretty sure that she will be inconsolable after the end of book five, and you are just going to have to forgive her for that. It's been a very long, very eventful six years, after all.

Outside of Writing:
Bex married in 2010, and that was a very poor decision, so she subsequently divorced a few years later. However, she continues to bear her married name, Aaron, both professionally and in her private life. If you only knew how terrible her maiden name was, you would understand.

She has worked a myriad of jobs, including an operator at an answering service, front desk at a trucker motel, inventory clerk at Johnson Space Center, receptionist at a day care center and, currently, legal assistant at a personal injury law firm. She'd still love nothing more than to be a rock star, though.

Trivia:
Bex is obsessed with music, having grown up listening to the Christian rock of the 1990s. This remains her favorite genre of music, though she no longer identifies as a Christian.

An only child, Bex also aspires to adopt a daughter and to raise her as an only child. Ideally, she would adopt a Chinese little girl, and show her the kind of life that she never could have in her home country.

Bex is a huge basketball fan, an NBA historian and a Clippers fan.

She's a master of accents, but she can't seem to conquer that Kiwi one.

Yes, those are her real nails. Stop asking.

She may or may not eat Nutella straight out of the jar.

She's 33 (as of this writing) and she doesn't know how to drive. And you know what? That's just fine.

Bex is a total cat person. She's also a total Mac person. She's only owned one Android in her life and she dropped it in the bathtub she was so frustrated with it. (Okay, that was actually an accident, but she still wasn't sorry to see the damned thing go!)

She's just as profane as her characters, but nowhere near as angst-ridden.

She's totally cool and she'd like to get to know you. For realz.