I’ve been writing stories since I was seven years old. My cousin and I started a club when we were little. It was just the two of us in this “Froggy Club” she created, but we acted as if there were tons of people included. I asked her about roles for each other and then asked if I could be the newspaper writer. She agreed.
I used my newfound authority and created these “members” of our club to write news stories on. Eventually, it evolved into writing an entire story about a specific member’s life that I worked on for a couple of years. A simple yes to a job position sparked my first love of writing.
In fifth grade, I met my best friend who was also interested in writing stories. Me, being the ENTP that I would soon find out about, challenged her to write a story over the summer and show it to all our friends to find out who the best writer was. She was interested in writing urban fantasy while I had only written about a middle school girl who had to hide the fact that she was a model from all her friends. To keep us on the same playing field, I changed my writing genre and wrote an urban fantasy: super hero kids who saved the world from devastation.
When we returned to school that following Autumn semester, she told me she couldn’t come up with a story, so she forfeited the challenge. That didn’t stop me. I continued writing that story for the next three years. Any chance I got, I would either work on plotting the next three books (yes, I was planning on writing a four book series when I was only eleven years old) or working on the actual story. Not gonna lie: I was usually editing the first couple of chapters.
I found my love of fantasy through my best friend.
My grandfather died while I was in eighth grade, which sparked my first writer’s block. I couldn’t pick up the story any more. I couldn’t write the next chapter, I couldn’t thinking about plotting, I couldn’t even edit what I already had.
In ninth grade, I was reintroduced to Text Based Role Playing (my cousin tried introducing it to me a few years before, but I didn’t get the concept). I then wrote for multiple characters in multiple scenarios for years. I kept that first major story in a binder on my bookshelf, waiting for the inspiration to pick it back up again.
I graduated high school; my friend and I grew our separate ways. I tried to go back to my old story, but having grown up and understood the world a little better, I realized just how out of touch the story was. So much of it was not researched on and therefore wrong, and those wrong things drove the plot. I couldn’t edit it without changing the story completely. So it continued to sit on my bookshelf, collecting dust, serving as a reminder of how I used to write my heart out when I was younger.
In college, my spark came back. I had a dream that was pictured as though I was watching a movie. Every time a major scene ended, the title would be displayed. I woke up and wrote the dream down in as much vivid detail as I could remember.
I wrote the first chapter to that story over and over and over for the next couple of years. I went to my first writing critique group who adored my writing abilities. I showed that chapter to friends who encouraged me to write more of it. But I was just so afraid that if I progressed the story, I would tarnish the immaculate chapter that I already had.
So it sat on my bookshelf, collecting dust, serving as a reminder that I really could write well if I just tried.
I picked it up again for my first NaNoWriMo in November 2019. I added 10 chapters to the story before getting distracted with the newly released Sims 4 University halfway through the month.
A couple months later, I mentioned to my (birth) mother that I wanted to release stories on a monthly schedule. Except, not multiple stories, I wanted to release a chapter of the same story every month. She encouraged me to do this, but it took a minute before I worked up the nerve to start it.
In April 2020, I started my first serial publication. I posted a NSFW romance story on a wordpress blog. I decided to release twice a month to start with and then up it to every week, eventually twice a week.
For 3 months, I released content for the story. But something just didn’t feel right. I kept to my promise and published when I said I would, but I just wasn’t getting much traffic and I was becoming less and less interested in what I was writing. By the end of June 2020, I announced that I was going on hiatus until I figured out what I could do to give my story the luster it lacked.
On the 3rd day of July 2020, about a week of not writing, I had another dream. In this dream, a girl sat at a table during a ceremony. Her name wasn’t being called while everyone else’s did. Toward the end of a the ceremony, just as the host was about to say his closing statements, a boy barged in and walked up to the host. The host pointed to the girl and the boy introduced himself as her soulmate. The scene morphed into a garden. The girl walked around until being spotted by the boy. The boy then explained to her that he was an outcast from high society and that’s why they were paired together.
I woke up, rushed to my notebook, and wrote the dream down. I talked with a few writer friends who all encouraged me to work on that plot since I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
So I worked on it.
When I wrote my serial, I was forcing 6,000 words out of my fingers a month. As I write this story, I’m averaging 1,000 words per day.
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