My Writing Life: An Introduction

I don't remember exactly when I started writing, but I was in middle school when I started writing angsty white girl poems. Those were the first things I wrote that I saved. I've lost many stories since then, thanks to flooded apartments and outdated technology. But no matter what, I still write.

My first official writing class was a creative writing class my senior year in high school. I didn't consider myself a writer then, just a theatre kid who adored books and wrote poems about my feelings, something I figured all teen girls did in the final decade of the 20th Century. When I graduated in 2000, I had helped publish a literary magazine but I wasn't published because I couldn't bear to submit anything I'd written.

I started college planning to get a BS teaching high school English because that's what I always wanted/expected I would do. Applying to the College of Education at my university was a big deal because it's the original NC Teacher's College, so they take this very seriously. I registered for a class that was required before I could even declare myself a teaching major, but because I didn't have a car to get me to the required tutoring at one of the local schools, I had to drop the class before the semester started.

So I switched my major. Instead of pursuing a BS in English Education, I received a BA in English, Creative Writing, with a minor in History because all BAs need minors.

I hadn't written anything other than essays for class in a long time, and stories for class were close to essays. In my writing classes I learned more than my literature classes could teach me. I wrote about my best friend's addiction and our falling out. I named characters after her in my fictional short stories. I had characters that looked like her but were my version of who I wished she was instead of the best friend who deserted me.

I graduated and continuted working at local restaurants, eventually working my way to Assistant Manager of a local pizza joint. (This restaurant and one of the business owners becomes the basis of an important aspect of my current WIP.) I left the restaurant business in the summer of 2013, months before the birth of my son.

I didn't write again until a few months after my son's second birthday. We had moved right before his birthday, not far, just two miles from our last address. But something changed and that led me to my current project.

I'm not ready to say too much about my current WIP but it's a YA contemporary dystopian novel, if that's even a thing. If not, I guess it's an alternate reality dystopian novel? I really don't know how to describe it right now because I'm undergoing a major revision right now that includes adding both characters and narrators. (Sorry Amanda and Nikki, you've got more to read!)