Okay, I'm going to try to start blogging more about my writing. So, the first logical step is to tell you a bit about how I got started. (I really wish I had a working computer for this instead of having to do it on my phone...)
First of all, I never even thought about writing when I was younger. I know some people can say that they knew since they were little kids what they wanted to be, or what they wanted to do with their lives. I never had a clue. Hell, I still don't know. But one important constant that I had throughout, was a love of reading.
It wasn't until I was already finishing up my basics at university that I finally decided to declare English as my new major. That's after I restarted at a new university after a failed start as a software engineering major.
It was around my second to last year as an undergrad (I was there a lot longer than I should have been) that I finally got an interest in creative writing. I made a few awkward attempts at writing shorter pieces (none of which still exist today), and eventually settled on an idea that I really liked. It was a story about a guy who dies and at the gates of judgement is told that he wasn't bad enough to deserve hell, but he wasn't good enough to earn heaven, so hell by default. It was meant to be a dark comedy, but as much as I liked the concept, the execution was terrible. Unlike most of my work up to that point, that story survives on my hard drive to this day. But I stopped writing after that.
Some time later, once I was already in grad school, I started writing again. I had a creative writing class that sparked the interest again. But if you know grad school, you know that I didn't have much time to write, unless it was for class. But what forced me to start writing again, was the final project for my detective fiction class. We had to write our own detective fiction stories. As it had become my favorite genre, I was excited to give it a try. It was a bit derivative, but it came out good.
While all of this was going on, I was dealing with all of the haunting and supernatural stuff that I've dealt with for most of my life. There's something about having a demon after you that gives you an interest in the supernatural, what can I say?
That combination of sources gave me the inspiration for the last story I wrote, which I'll talk about in another blog if anyone is interested. But the point is that by the time I got to this story, I was ready to write, and I was a more capable writer than I was on my first real attempt at writing.
If you made it all the way through that, thanks for listening. I'm sure I left a lot out, but it was long enough as it is.
