Monday Miscellany: Nine Facts

I could write about how allergies suck or how my muse is a sneaky bastard, but, instead, I'm going to go the meme route and offer you nine (writing-related) facts about myself. I know that I sometimes like to see these posts from the bloggers I love. Maybe you care, too. (And if not, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Or Wednesday. Depends on how long it takes me to format the next formatting post.)

1. I have been "writing" since even before I could spell. I have distinct memories of scribbling on notebook pages when I was three or so, speaking the story out loud.

2. When I was eleven, I wrote an entire series about marine biologists and their kids/teenage interns/college students. Each story was the length of a young adult novel and I took inspiration for the series from The Babysitter's Club. (You know, each story is centered on a different member of the club, etc.) They were really bad, but I was proud of them. I drew covers and printed them out and stapled them together and everything.

3. My first experience with fanfiction was writing my own Frank Hardy/Nancy Drew shipper fic. Joe caught them kissing. I was nine, okay?

4. My first real experience with fanfiction online was Star Wars. I know you're shocked. This was back in the late nineties, right after the original trilogy was re-released. I read a lot of Hanson, Backstreet Boys, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic, too.

5. The first fanfiction I ever wrote and shared with fandom is actually a recommended story on a famous cross-fandom reference site. I am insanely proud of this.

6. I have had a muse since I was about eleven. I used to rely exclusively on inspiration to strike until I realized--when I was about fourteen--that inspiration is pretty much always there and when it isn't, it can be manufactured until it's real.

7. That said, I've still suffered writer's block. In fact, my most recent stretch of it was through 2008. I'm still trying to recover my 2005 - 2007 mojo.

8. The vampire novel I'm working on, The Guest, has been written and re-written five times in the last fourteen years. I finally feel like the version I'm working on now is the right one. That may change.

9. In my second year of college, when I was a criminal justice major with the intention of going to law school, my philosophy professor pulled me aside and suggested I give up law and "write for a living." He wasn't the first or last educator to suggest that, but I remember him the most.