Quote of the Day: I'm not giving up my writing hour come hell or high water. What do you mean "it's high water"? -- Me
Personal note: I won't be online tonight. I'm going to crawl into bed as soon as I get home in hopes that more sleep will improve my mood.
Crossroads: An Author Self-Interrogation Chapter 1
11). What have been your most powerful (intense, significant, formative) non-sexual experiences (during childhood, adolecence, maturity)?
I'm mature? Okay, so that is debatable.
Significant experience that comes to mind happened when I was in the ninth grade, a freshman in high school. No longer a stranger, since the middle school had to be closed at the end of my sixth grade year and seventh and eighth grades were spent on the high school campus. Travel back in time to 1992. (What's going to be scary is when that actually becomes a period to go back to in the movies.) I had been writing continuously (well, it came in spurts but the spurts were more frequent) since 1988. The English teacher took one of my short stories to read to the class. I was trying to create a modern Gothic, a girl haunted and killed by her incestual deceased older brother (possibly step-brother, those details are fuzzy).
Nobody got it. A story I thought was so clear needed Superman's X-ray vision for anyone else to understand it. Even worse, none of my classmates thought my writing was something special, something unique. "So-and-so has stories too. She should get the teacher to read them too." That was devestating. I think it was part of the reason I first turned to fanfics; my friends who liked the original universe would be the only ones who saw them. But even their praise of "wow, this is good" grew stale.
I fluctuated between fanfics and originals all through high school, not even knowing what a fanfic was. The Internet wasn't available until after I got to college. I remember a friend giving back a story with "that was good. I really liked the characters." I hadn't had to pull the second sentence from him with pliers and was overjoyed.
I wish I would have had Orson Scott Card's checklist back then to hand people who wanted to read my stories.
Read Free!
The BookWorm
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