Some backstory (and a tribute to the people that got me here)
I grew up HATING English classes. Hated silent reading time, hated the weekly trips to the school library to pick out a library book. I’d try to get around it, with comics and graphic novels, or just end up choosing the SHORTEST very below my reading level books. Up until the middle of elementary school, that’s just how things were, I was a math person and a visual artist.
That all changed, however, when my mother and fourth grade teacher staged kind of an intervention of sorts of my 11-year-old self. My teacher knew I could read at a higher level than I was, and my mother (also a teacher, that part’s important) knew I could too. So I was told that I needed to read more my-age books, and my mother took me to the nearest bookstore.
In the back of the children’s section, my mom pulled books that she thought would interest me. She’d flip to a random page and see if I could read all the words on it, and that’d be her system of testing my reading level (I’d try to mispronounce words as I theoretically could on purpose).
After our usual back and forth, she pulled one book from the wall of kids books, and read the back, smiled, and flipped to a random page. Giving me the book, she had me read the page, and one word stood out. Mermaid. As much as I wanted NOT to enjoy it, mermaids got me. I ended up reading that book in hour-long intervals that week, making my way through books one and two within the month.
My fourth grade teacher pulled me aside–I remember–after I’d submitted my required reading log and little summary paragraph for the week, and asked what’d changed. I told her that I liked reading now. She’d known that, saying something along the lines of “just needing to find what I liked to read” (thanks Mrs. Murray).
That one push to read changed the direction of my entire life, to put it lightly. A love for mermaids and mythological creatures turned into a love for fantasy books, then a love for reading longer crafted words and supernatural stories, and eventually, a desire to write. My first “story” of sorts was written about a year later, when I started becoming a real wordsmith (or as eloquitely put as a fifth-grader could be for a collaborative superhero story with friends), and as the years went on, I only wrote more and more.
When high school hit, I knew I wanted to be an author. With bookshelves lined with stories that bounced around in my mind at all times, to getting my first job at the very bookstore where I had my reading-love sparked, I knew I wanted to write stories people would read. Make something that some kid would pull off the shelf at the age I did, and fall head-over-heels in love with.
But saying you want to write is easier than actually sitting down to do it.
The past six-ish years have been like that, writing smaller pieces, keeping them to myself, and trying to work on this big piece that pulled from so many places and pieces of inspiration. But finally I want to show that I’m a writer, finally put bits and pieces about this love-child I have had in the works for a while now out there. Slot myself on a shelf somewhere with the people that got me here. Super corny, I know, but it’s my dream.
(Thank you to my mother, for making me read, and authors like Liz Kessler, Chris Colfer, and Soman Chainani for keeping tiny-tot me reading)