Hey guys.
Since I’m getting closer to publishing my first novel, I figured I should share how I became a writer in the first place, in case you were interested.
I started writing when I was ten years old, starting out with good ol’ fashioned pencil and looseleaf paper, then moving onto ink. I carried my stories with me in a folder everywhere I went in my backpack so I could write anywhere. School, the doctor’s waiting room, waiting for the bus, whatever. At one point, I wrote so much that I had to leave most of what I wrote at home and only carry the most recent pages I’ve written with mostly blank loose-leaf paper.
I still have most of my handwritten stuff in a chest in my room.
A couple of years go by and my uncle suggests I use a flash drive to write my stories (I still have it, too). It only has one gig of storage space, but that was more than enough for me at the time. He used to say “it’s like carrying a computer in your pocket,” for my pubescent brain to understand. So I started writing digitally, using whatever computer I can find with Microsoft Word on it for me to write. I used my mom’s laptop most of the time, but sometimes I went to the library, or the computer lab in school and stayed there for hours writing my stories just to save them on the flash drive. Luckily word documents are tiny in terms of storage space.
On my 16th birthday, I got my own laptop and started saving everything on there, abandoning the flash drive method for fear of viruses. And it wasn’t until sometime in college that I discovered the beauty of Google Docs. I got paranoid of my computer dying on me with all the memory on it without me backing it up so I just uploaded everything onto the cloud and have been writing there ever since. I still regularly download them just in case something happens to the cloud.
Writing is very therapeutic for me. It helps me get all my jumbled thoughts and emotions out of my head and onto a physical thing I can see and organize. It’s helped me get through hard times. I used to think I wrote better if I was depressed, but that wasn’t true, I just had more to write when I was.
I took all of one creative writing class in high school for half the year. That was the only real “formal” training I ever got, and by then I knew most of what they were teaching. Before that, I was self taught. I would copy the format of books I’ve read in terms of how to write dialogue correctly, pacing, how to make characters seem more alive, etc. While going to grad school, my creative writing friends taught me what they learned in their degree. There was a lot I didn’t know and I am very grateful for their lessons because I’m a better writer for it.
I write mainly fantasy and literary fiction. My first two published works I would say are literary fiction. That’s the type of genre that is more character rather than plot-driven. They are short stories I wrote in high school and decided to publish just to get my name out there, which you can find here on my website.
I am currently working on my first novel called Fallen Star. It will be a series, I’m not sure how long, it depends on how the story goes, but I already have at least 5 or 6 of them planned out.
This is the story I have been writing since I was 11 years old. I’ve been writing this book for more than 15 years, and I think it’s about time I let my baby fly from the nest. I’m still in the editing process but it is nearly done and I am so excited! I’m also working on artwork with a friend of mine. I always loved it whenever chapter books had pictures to look at, so I’m trying to do the same.
In Fallen Star, Alexis wakes up in the hospital with no memory of who she is or where she’s been with the only thing familiar being the crystal necklace hanging from her neck. She learns that she has been missing since she was a baby, stolen out of her crib at just 2 months old. Once out of the hospital, she meets a boy named Dan and he claims that he and his little brother saw her fall from the sky, and then she shows up? At first, she was skeptical because she didn’t remember that until they decided to investigate and actually found something that triggered a memory. The more Alexis and Dan investigate, the more Alexis feels she’s somehow connected to the Night of Discord, a freak magical attack that wrecked her hometown the night she was born.
It’s YA women but anyone is welcome to read it. There’s modern fantasy, there’s a bit of horror, mystery, I’m a sucker for romance, I try to be funny? And let’s not forget the violence. Fictional violence is the best kind of violence.
So that’s how I became a writer. It was mostly self-teaching, research, tips from my writing friends, and practice that got me here.