How It All Began

I’ve always loved stories. Listening to them, reading them, and now writing them. Although there was a time in the dark years of tweenhood where I hated everything- including stories. So I’ve almost always loved stories. I did when I was little. I love them even more now.

When I was little, I used to play out stories with my Barbie dolls. They were cheesy. They often involved relationship drama that I knew nothing about. Most of them were basically Barbie, who was usually a princess living in modern day, being in the center of a love triangle between Ken and another Ken doll who I called Ryan. Barbie always chose Ken right away because he was everything a good Prince Charming should be, while Ryan was always despicable from the start.

I got too old for Barbie, Ken, Ryan, and Barbie’s friends when I was ten. They were put in a tote and put in the storage part of my basement, someday to be played with again, but not for a long, long, time. After an “I hate everything stage” I decided I needed something to do with the ideas still floating around in my head.

That’s when I started writing stories.  

Like most of the Barbie stories, the ones I wrote in my spiral notebook that was supposed to be used for school, these stories were about cheesy relationships in both modern and fantasy settings. They also had hordes of grammar errors that anyone would cringe at. I cringed so much reading them that I ended up throwing them into the garbage. 

Even though I wrote stories cheesier than macaroni and cheese covered in a twelve-cheese cheese sauce and the occasional prompt-based story for school, I wasn’t really interested in writing until my friends were. It was a phase most of them went through that I was still stuck in. I was part of a writing club one summer- and loved it. Loved spending time with my friends, creating fantasy characters, discussing writing, actually writing, and seeing my not-so-secret crush every week. I learned a lot just over that summer. The best part was I enjoyed it.

I had an entire binder full of character profiles after that. Then I lost it. When I found it again, I started making dialogues, more character profiles, and a fantasy world.

Then I started writing.