How I got started writing

 I've always been an avid reader, ever since I was a small child. I was lucky enough to have a family that had LOTS of books in the house, from picture books to textbooks. There was PLENTY to read; stories from around the world, Dr. Seuss books, science books, you name it! So of course I grew up to be an imaginative child who LOVED the written word.

I had always wanted to write my own stories, but I never really TRIED until I was thirteen. It was the English Week (an annual Puerto Rican school event where various English based contests are held) and my school was doing a Big Book contest. The idea was that students would write their own short stories, with their very own drawings. I entered the contest...

And got disqualified, because the drawings had to be hand made. Oy! A darn shame, really, but the people who read my story LOVED it! It was a story of a boy and some monsters. Really kiddy, not gonna lie.

In ninth grade I wrote another short story, a sci-fi story about people in space having an adventure. It won second place! I was so happy! It didn't hurt that I legit had a LOT of fun writing it, either! I suppose it was those contests that legitimately gave me the push I needed to get STARTED!

Then college came, and my writing was to be put on hold. And by that I mean my CREATIVE writing was put on hold; I was writing PLENTY of essays! Writing all those essays really, really sharpened my skills, you see. Also, I'll be honest when I say I always preferred essays over tests.

From 2000 to 2008, I spent a good portion of my free time reading fanfics. I still remember my very first fanfic; it was a Digimon fanfic called TK's True Love. It was a silly fanfic that did a LOT of no-nos: it starred an Original Character who got in the way of one of the fandom's most popular relationships, the OC was an unbelievable character with a RIDICULOUSLY out of place name (who the hell in Japan would name their kid MAEVE!?) and it was posted on a message board. But to fourteen year old me, that fanfic was an eye opener!

For a whole decade, the itch to write my own fanfic was persistent. Then, in 2009, I took the plunge and WROTE my very, very first fic! And know what? IT SUCKED!

I'm not gonna lie, I'm a bit embarrassed by my very first fanfic; it's poorly written, poorly plotted, the characters have craptacular dialogue, and it's all just amateurish. Then I wrote ANOTHER fanfic, and it was hardly any better.

But I had FUN writing my fanfics, and by 2010 I was writing them as much for my emotional health than anything. I was having a ROUGH time in those days, and to me, my fanfics were an escape from all that. Plus, they gave me a reason to keep going.

In my life, I've written about fifty fanfics. Of those fifty, about fifteen are finished. And of those fifteen, I think THREE are good. I'm not gonna lie about it. But I'm proud of my fics, because to me they show off my growth as a writer. EVERYONE has a bad story in them; that's why you gotta keep on writing!

By 2013 I decided to try my hand at writing my own original fiction. My idea was... I was gonna say "simple," but it really wasn't. A vampire, a werewolf, a witch, a homunculus, and an alchemist travel the world searching for five magic stones that'll summon a giant genie. It was Twilight meets Dragon Ball Z. I managed to write thirty nine chapters before dropping the story, having a mere eleven chapters to go. If you're wondering if I'll ever get back to it, sorry, but no; that story was erased when my computer died on me.

Save your works, folks.

Then in 2015 I tried my hand at self publishing. I had planned a short, ten chapter story about a young witch learning magic. Then, well, the tale grew with the telling, and what was SUPPOSED to be ten chapters to be finished by Christmas 2015 is an ongoing web novel that is currently fifty chapters long.

And that, boys and girls, is the problem with being a plantser.

I don't want to make this blog entry too long, so to summarize what I've written so far: I grew up with books, wrote my first story at age 13, honed my craft with fanfics, and now here I am, working on my goal to make it big!