Yeah, I'm not only going to write about reading here, I'm also going to harp on about my own writing. Because I'm kind of a shameless self-promoter.
Anyway, I started writing when I was six. My first story was called Lost Sheep, Come to Me. It was about a girl who had a pet sheep, but one day, IT GOT LOST! OH NO, right? Yeah. Well that girl searched and searched for her little sheepy-poo, but she didn't find it. It got hit by a car and died. Then the girl got a pony. My parents still have this story, written and illustrated in crappy smudged pencil, in a box of my stuff in the basement. This kicked off my addiction to writing. Many, many crappy stories followed it, mostly rip-offs of whatever I was reading at the time. I wrote my first really original story when I was eight. It was called Beth of Junivele... it was a fantasy story about some girl who got transported to some faraway land where she was a princess. It was never finished, but got to the twenty-page marker, which of course made me think I was a child prodigy.
I kind of stopped writing for a couple years, besides stupid emo diaries, and I then I started writing another epic fantasy story about a girl named Ea. Yeah. Ea. Pronounced Eeee. This is the funniest, most tragic attempt at writing seriously, and I sometimes get it out to read and have a laugh. Then when I was twelve I started writing fanfiction religiously, Harry Potter and my 100 page Lord of the Rings sequel. Again, completely lame and tragic.
Then came grade eight. Thirteen years old. I was working on a School of Rock fanfiction, and our school was visited by an author. A real, live author. She had written some Middle Grade novels, none that I'd heard of. I wasn't really interested in her presentation, until I heard her say that one of her novels was 30,000 words. That was precisely the length of my fanfiction, and it wasn't even finished yet. Just sitting there in that class room, the realization that I could - had! - written a novel hit me. My heart was pounding.
So over the next two weeks I finished my fanfiction, and I went back and changed every name so that it was no longer a fanfiction. It was my own novel, dammit! I had written a novel. Again, I had that child prodigy feeling. I was fucking thirteen and I had written a novel! How badass was I?! I had visions of publishing executives pounding at my door, begging for the thirteen-year-old genius to sign a contract with them. I wanted to start popping multiple copies in the mail right then and there.
But there was a problem: I didn't know anything about the publishing industry that I was going to conquer. So I started researching. And in researching, I discovered that I should probably start revising this amazing novel of mine. I also discovered how very easy it is to get sucked into a project and start to shamelessly procrastinate. I never did send that novel out. Thank god, because it sucked!
But I kept writing. I wrote another sucky novel, the sequel to that first one. But of course, at the time I thought it was fucking amazing omg and would get me uber-famous. I actually really wish I still had this novel, because it might be good for a laugh these days, but unfortunately it was lost in the Great Accidental Deleting-of-Files.
I guess I kind of forgot about my publication dreams for a while. In the summer before grade nine, I wrote a novel about a girl who worked as a roadie for her brother's rock band, and it was twice as long as my other novels, and actually didn't suck too bad. I was definitely improving. And in October of grade nine, in Social Studies class, I wrote the first paragraph of the novel that was to become an obsession. It was called Ambulance, and it was about two gay boys. At first it was a short story, but I decided to expand it into an entire novel. Because by this point I was really good at that.
I started writing it and letting my friends read it. They became my fans, and they passed each chapter around as I wrote it, and before long I had dozens of "subscribers", not only in my own grade but in the older grades, as well. It was pretty thrilling to actually have people talking to me instead of tripping me and throwing food at me. I'm actually still working on Ambulance - it's the only one of my early novels that shows signs of not being total crap. I actually consider it the best thing I've written so far. Too bad it took four years to get it to that point.
So directly after Ambulance, I wrote another short novel about gay guys. Then another one. Then another. That brings us to grade twelve, age sixteen, when I wrote a NaNo novel about superheroes that I didn't really finish. Then I wrote a lot of poetry. Then another NaNo novel that I did finish, The Superhero Effect, which I'm now revising. Now I'm working on the sequel to that, The List of Heroes.
But... I'm kind of petering out on it. It's getting to be a lot of work, just sitting down to write and upping my word count. I guess since I got my new MacBook distractions have been plentiful. But I also think I'm just losing interest in it a little bit. There's a new idea trying to seduce me away from it. I'm trying to decide if I should start this new project, and put this one on hold for a while.
Or maybe I should keep at it, skip the hard parts and write out-of-order, just to get a messy first draft down. I think that's what I need to do. Or, that's what the novel needs me to do. And I do want to finish it, I do! I'm still in love with the idea, especially since I had an amazing jackpot idea for how to tie up the whole trilogy.
It's just this new idea is so appealing :( I think because it has to do with gay guys again. I haven't written about them in a while and for some reason I love it.
Anyway... just trying to figure out what to do here. This is as good a place as any to vent!
