Oof, squiders, sorry I’m flaky this week. My basement has flooded TWICE in THREE DAYS. At least we’ve figured out the problem this time, as opposed to two days ago when we thought we’d figured the problem out and were obviously wrong.
(God, we’d better be right this time.)
Did you know if you have a wet/dry vacuum you can just vacuum up water? For some reason this is very strange to me.
ANYWAY.
Normally I like to leave the WriYe prompts til a little later in the month, but man, this has been a week, and I’m too tired to figure things out otherwise.
Describe your writing beginnings. How did you get started?
I started writing when I was about eight, and mostly because my mother was a writer. Emulating her and all that. This is back in the olden days, when we had CorelWrites and WordPerfect and you had to know the key shortcuts to do things. Or sometimes I wrote on an electric typewriter.
I started, like many people, using my favorite things as a base, changing a character here, a premise there. I had some picture and puzzle books I made my own versions of, plus I made up roleplaying situations for me and my cousins to do based on my favorite shows and video games, and I made a fashion book based on the Wizard of Oz, and other bizarre creative things only children ever think of.
I mainly focused on roleplaying throughout my teens, aside from writing a few short stories and starting a dozen novels that never went anywhere. In college Nanowrimo started, and that’s when I switched more to writing from roleplaying.
What was your “a-ha” moment that made you realize this was something you wanted to pursue?
So I started doing Nanowrimo in 2003, which was fun! I really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the friends I met through the event. But I mostly only wrote during November. I would finish my drafts slowly throughout the rest of the year (my last year I snuck off to a tea shop called The Tea Spot at least once a week, where I wrote and ate scones and also fancy chocolates) but it was just a hobby.
In 2006 we moved to California, where I knew no one. I didn’t have a job for the first few months and I was super, super depressed and isolated. I think I’ve told you guys this story before.
Anyway, I recognized that things were going poorly and decided that I needed to do something to keep me occupied, and I decided that I wanted to write full-time and maybe try to do something more formal with everything, so I joined a bunch of writing groups (some of which I still belong to today, including WriYe, actually) which gave me some much needed social interaction and got me going on something until I got a job and started to find my place in my new home.
And here we still are, I guess. Nothing big. Just a decision, once upon a time.
Anyway, pray for my basement, squiders. If nothing else, then for my state of mind.
See you next week!
Yeah vacuuming up water seems strange to me too. The hoover is electric and it always feels like it should short it out or something. Technology is weird and wonderful haha. I don’t know either of those computer programs you listed. I’m pretty sure I started digitally with Microsoft Works on Windows 3.1. You must be a few years older than me because it sounds like we discovered NaNo at the same point in our lives but I was 2007.
I love that description of that coffee shop, it sounds very writerly! Good aesthetic 🙂 Wow I didn’t realise WriYe had been going for that long, 2006 really? Wow. I mean I knew it had been around a while as I think I joined in 2011 and then promptly forgot about it for years, something I now fiercely regret because it’s such a great community.
I hope your basement gets sorted out!
It was THE BEST aesthetic. Alas, it’s no longer there. I tried to take some friends once I moved back and they’ve gone online only, supplying their teas to other places but not maintaining their own cafe. (My local coffee shop uses their tea, actually.)
Hahahaha yeah, WriYe is ancient. I don’t remember if 2006 was the first year or not–it did seem to be the year that a lot of other challenges/writing groups spun off of Nano–but I was actually a moderator near the end of the year. It was my job to come up with challenges to try and re-engage people (since, as you know, people kind of wander off the longer the year goes on) but I don’t think I was very good at it, and then I got distracted and wandered off myself.