History

Apparently I've given up on numbering these. Huh. Well. Josh wrote an entry about ideas and getting things going and privacy and it got me thinking about my own writing. I'm not going to post anything here -- you know first rights get messy when you post on websites, and I want to keep my options open right now, especially since, ew editing -- but it occurs to me that I talk and talk about writing, but my own history remains clouded.

You might not be interested, but this is my blog and you don't have to read my entries, so I'm going to do it anyways.

I don't remember when I started writing specifically. There is an old book I made when I was 6 about someone who lost a tooth, and old diaries in which I wrote things about fairy stories I wanted to write to evidence that its been a while. I can't remember not writing. I do remember the first time I started a novel. It was, in some ways amusingly, fanfiction for Julie of the Wolves. It was awful, and involved a ten year old kayaking down the east coast as part of a race. I did get about 60 illustrated pages in before I stopped, worried that it was too similar to Julie of the Wolves.

My next attempt was with Josh and Jasper. Jasper had gotten really into Warcraft 3000, and was telling us about the story and we got into a discussion on how to make a story that would work. This is the first and only time me and my brother have collaborated on anything creative together. Usually Jasper pisses me off too much for us to have conversations, so it seems like we're unlikely to start that again.

Sometime later I had a tutor who wrote a 14000 word story with me, which I illustrated and for the most part I plotted. I still have it somewhere, and its amusing to read. I sent it to a magazine once, but they said it was too long (what a surprise).

Serious fantasy came next because I started reading Tamora Pierce. There was the Five Worlds series which has since been lost, Rise of the Phoenix, which actually wasn't a terrible idea and when I put it up on the original fiction part of fanfiction.net got reviews that shaped my future writing career. I had a problem with pacing in seventh grade, and this person wrote an extensive review of how I should read more and needed to pace things better. I got mad at yelled at them later, but I wish I knew who it was now, because -- well everything changed after that.

There was Apinda, a novel I wrote with Felix and Rory's help the summer before ninth grade. It was basically an idea similar to The Old Kingdom but there were some clever bits in there about races and a world banded in seasons. Unfortunately I'm a bit too science-y to be willing to write it now, plus I would need to reestablish a connection to the characters, but it was an idea at the time. Apinda was the first novel I ever finished -- hand written in a notebook I have since lost. I loved that I finished it.

I was about to say I didn't know what I did between ninth and eleventh grade, but it occurs to me that it was the RP phase of my life where I wrote consistently for days and days and days with two people (for the most part). Cat, who helped shape Adair and Will, and Dany who helped create Jacob and Cnyderia. This was probably the most industrious part of my life, the time when I got the most practice and worked out my pacing issues. This was the part of my life where everything was about getting to write that post, to get things out. I often say that RPing is a great way to become a better writer (maybe not here) and it is because this was the point where characters became different from me, the point when I found my feet as a writer. RPing may have screwed me up socially (okay, it did. My second boyfriend came around during this time and I dumped him because he was cutting into my RP time... how screwed up is that? Also, I stopped being friends with certain people during this time, and in the end, the person I was closest with during RP vanished abruptly and without warning, leaving me with a host of issues that probably precipitated the break with my current (at the time) best friend... I have suffered for my art... or am just a screwy person, your choice) but it gave me a huge amount of practice (there was so much writing all the time) and cemented my love of writing.

After that novels started coming out every year. I started NaNo and wrote -- a lot. Since then I have written 6 novels in their entirety and have countless other projects which are all at least 10,000 words in (mostly because these days 1 chapter is 10,000 words x.x). There are two novels which I have begun the clean up of, three which are never going to see the light of day (partly because half of them got lost when my hard drive died, and partly because THEY ARE SO BAD), one which is actually all right, but is the first book in a series that I don't know where it is going and one which has been turned into a web graphic (a graphic novel on the web if I ever get around to putting it up).

Um... I don't know why I wrote this. I REALLY don't know why you read this if you got to the end. It was a bunch of rambling because I was reading Josh's post (have I mentioned Josh is my cousin? I don't know if I have, but he is, and probably the person out there who I have shared most of my creative endevers)  and he has this one project which he has been working on for years, and I was like "What have I got to show for a lifetime of writing?" (lifetime = 22 years thus far). This is what I've got to show. Seven novels, two that I would be willing to show to anyone. Well, show might be a little bit of a stretch.

After the RP phase, I stopped showing people my writing, or talking about the fact that I did write. People who knew me from before knew I loved to write, but people after often get surprised when I say I write, and their surprise surprises me. I could probably read something in to that, couldn't I?