I've loved to read ever since I was a very small child. I had that iconic childhood of my mom reading me bedtime stories every night. Mother Goose, Aesop, Disney Classics; my shelves were filled with all of the childhood staples. In first grade, Mr. Simone, a teacher I had the biggest, most blatant little-girl crush oh, started reading books to us on Fridays. One book in particular grabbed my imagination: the Boxcar Children. It was a children's chapter book series chronicling four orphaned siblings as they solved mysteries of all sorts. I read the series all the way through elementary school, and still have the volumes I collected. I devoured books from then on, joining book clubs and children's magazines, spending hours each week at the library. But by middle school books like the Saddle Club or the Boxcar Children weren't enough.
I began to pay attention to what my mom read, asking her what was happening in the books while she was reading them. I would spend hours flipping through her extensive fantasy and science fiction collection, and had my imagination captured again by the Hobbit, and the Dark Elf Trilogy. But, in those days, writing wasn't all that interesting to me. I had a vivid imagination, but I exercised it while playing outside with my friends, telling elaborate, heart-throbbing stories that turned my little Baltimore suburb into Middle Earth or the Wild West.
I was always very active as a kid. I played sports with the boys, loved to get dirty, the typical tomboy. I had dreams of going into the Air Force like my dad, with my sights set on NASA. I did karate, and even worked on a horse ranch the summer before high school. At the end of that summer, I went on a riding trip with a bunch of other girls for a week. The first night, I was playing around with one of the other girls who did karate, teaching her a thing or two I'd learned in movies. She wasn't the greatest student, and a kick that was meant to sweep my legs instead dislocated my knee. It righted itself as I fell, and neither I nor the adults could see that anything was wrong, so they let me make the decision to stay and ride.
That decision changed my life.
I destroyed my knee during that trip and throughout the rest of my childhood, continually dislocating the knee. In the process, as anyone with a knee injury will tell you, my other knee deteriorated as well. I could no longer run or play sports, and chronic pain left me not wanting to do very much outside.
It was around that time that my parents bought AOL, and we had internet in the house for the first time. I discovered roleplaying, and before long I'd found a new channel for my bottled up imagination. I roleplayed every second I could, and before long characters began to come to life. Soon enough I was writing on and offline, sharing the stories with anyone who would read them and enjoying every reaction they got. It was my senior year in high school that did it for me. In our English class, we were told to write a dialogue to perform in front of the class. For extra credit, I did a monologue by myself. After finishing the performance, I was met with a heavy silence as the other kids gaped and stared at me. Just when I was starting to get nervous, they broke out into applause, one girl telling me she got goosebumps.
That's when I knew I had to write.
I dove headfirst into the study of language and how to write fiction. I was fortunate to meet some published writers who mentored me and who I still look up to. I continued to devour any book I could get my hands on, learning various styles of storytelling in various genres. I continued to roleplay, as well, painting elaborate stories with other novice writers. It was for these people that I learned to be a better writer; if they weren't enjoying the story I was creating, then they weren't going to keep playing.
Energized by the companionship of another dedicated writer, I'm diving into my own writing, in the hopes of polishing my skills into something worth putting on display. This blog will, hopefully, be a roadmap for those who follow my blazed path, detours and setbacks clearly marked so you don't make the same mistakes I do.
