Writing History

While blogs usually have about me pages I figure that my writing history would be more relevant at this time. I have been writing since I was a kid, exactly how old I don't really know. As a kid two things really brought me joy, reading and writing. In either case I could be whoever I wanted to be. Imagination has no limits so when I was reading or writing I felt limitless.

I used to write in notebooks or on notepaper at random. I would come up with a story idea or a character idea and I just had to make it come to life. It was almost a compulsion. It was like the characters were real people who I was holding hostage in my imagination and that were fighting to get out and breathe.

I grew up during the age of the home computer. While my father had a computer for most of my life it wasn't until I was in high school that we really got a new one. It was an old Compaq and it had a total of a 2GB hard drive that my dad swore we would never be able to fill up when we bought it. We got an account through AOL and used the home phone for dial-up. At this point in time I still wrote on paper. My access to computers was highly regulated and my father was extremely paranoid that the internet would kill my brain and infect me with evil. I would use the computer to research school projects and to write reports but that was about all that was allowed.

In my junior year of high school I met a kindred spirit that was just like me in so many ways. We started creating stories together. I would right a sentence or two, maybe a paragraph and then it would be her turn. We would pass stories back and forth for the other one to complete. It was something new and awesome to me and we fed off of each other's creativity.

She was active in an online role-playing group based off of AOL chat rooms called Rhydin. Immediately I was hooked. I could interact with dozens of people all at once and together we wrote an interactive story. Instead of me making up all the details in my own mind and relying only off of my creativity we would feed off each other. One of the chat rooms was setup as a tavern. Anyone could interact with anyone else and respond to what everyone else was doing. You could have a dragon sitting in a corner, an assassin with an animal familiar hiding in the shadows of another corner and a big group of orcs causing a lot of ruckus in the middle of it all. To me it was creative writing heaven! It was like we stepped into the middle of the most vast fantasy universe ever. They even had role-played fighting. Hits and misses were based off of a random roll generator that was built into the chat system. Similar to DND style playing we could be competitive with each other on a grand scale. There were even fighting leagues. Unfortunately my love affair with the world of Rhydin was cut short by my father who decided that the system was the "work of the devil" and "evil incarnate".

This didn't stop my drive to create fantasy however. I started searching for online writing sites. The main one at the time was Writer.com. At that time it was a lot like MySpace, it was the "in" place to write. Since then there have been a ton of sites like it that are available to writers. DeviantArt and WritersCafe were other sites that I was on. DeviantArt was always centered more around visual artistry. It was pictures and graphics mostly, but they left the ability for written works as well. I loved sharing and getting feedback on my work. It felt good to be able to share with other artists and get their feedback, especially the good stuff. I felt vindicated as a writer.

When I turned eighteen I was slapped with the hard reality of having to make money. I ended up going in the Army. I fell in love with the wondeful man that I've spent my life with ever since. We had kids, traveled from one spot to another and have struggled to just keep things going. When I was a stay at home mom I often would write in online forum role-plays. My favorite to this day is a wonderful site called DragonMount that does group fan fiction based off of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Series. Though I found it to be awesome I found that staying within their guidelines was sometimes hard for me to do. My imagination kept wanting to go above and beyond the normal.

I wouldn't trade it for the world, but I stifled my own ability to write for about the last five years. I got caught up in the thought that I had to work myself extra hard at something I didn't like in order to be a success. I was chasing after a job that would pay me to life the lifestyle that I wanted. I stopped writing at all. I would work myself beyond my limits and then come home and collapse. I would watch tv or play a video game to unwind and of course I kept reading, but it just wasn't the same. The rejuvenation that I get from writing wasn't there. So, here I am to reclaim that once again. It's my giant experiment, I hope that it turns out for the best!