My Story
When I was about six years old, I remember sitting in my bedroom with my favorite books, Junie B. Jones, and copying them into a notebook. Suddenly I was an author, or so I thought; this was before I understood the concept of ‘plagiarism.’ But that was when it all started. That was when I began dreaming of writing my own stories.
But even before then, I would sit in my room for hours with my beanie babies. I wasn’t much of a Barbie girl. I would create a little village in my room, pair up all the beanie babies together and play make believe. They all had their own story, and I knew each one.
Mr. Ostrich and Mrs. Flamingo were an odd couple, but they loved each other despite their differences. Mr. Horse and Mrs. Unicorn were usually the mayors. Because every beanie baby town needs a power couple. Green Bunny and Pink Bunny loved Purple Baby Bunny very much. Mr. Lion and Mrs. Tiger adopted Calico Kitty because they had enough love to give to her.
I had upwards of eighty beanie babies, and I found each one a place in my little world and someone to love them. At a young age, I was without any preconceived notions about how the world was supposed to work. I organized them in a variety of categories, some were by color, some were by shape or species, some were simply cute together.
In second grade, my teacher started a program for us; if we wrote a story and drew the cover, she would have it bound for us. She cut and made the pages for us with lines and a space for an illustration, and kept them in a basket in the classroom for us to take whenever inspiration struck. I haven’t counted in a while, but I think I made over twenty of those little books. I wrote anything and everything I could think of.
Looking back on this now, I can’t help but think that I owe all my aspirations to that teacher. She made it seem so real, so possible, to become an author. Everyone has a teacher in their life that affected them the most, and that was my second grade teacher, Mrs. Krueger. No one else stood a chance.
After that, I started filling countless notebooks with my stories. Most of them revolved around horses, but what pre-teen girl isn’t in love with horses? I used the stories and characters I had played with for hundreds of hours with my beanie babies and spun them in dozens of different stories. I loved creating whole worlds in my head and filling them with people who had obstacles to overcome.
As I got older, the world started to impress its opinions on me. I grew up in a community that valued appearance and the logo on your clothing. The notebooks I started to fill stopped holding the stories and problems of my own characters, and turned into diary entries detailing my own. I struggled to find my place and myself in the world that I lived in.
High school was hell. I wanted desperately to be accepted by the people I spent every day with, but my confidence had been shattered time and again. I knew the things I was supposed to like, and the way I was supposed to act, but it wasn’t me. I felt like I was portraying a character in a book. But that character wasn’t the lead of the story. Everyone else was the lead of my own story. The more battered and buried my ‘self’ became, the more my inspiration wilted.
But even so, through it all, my love and my passion for reading and writing maintained. It was still at the very core of who I was. When it came time to make a life decision for myself, that didn’t involve the peers that had dictated my life since middle school, I chose writing. I consciously knew that I wouldn’t make it through four strenuous years of college if I wasn’t doing something that I loved. So I strived to get a literature degree. But life never goes how we want, despite the plans we make.
It’s taken me an entire lifetime to get to where I am today. It took all of my twenties to find myself, to cast off the projections that had molded me. And I’m still discovering things about myself that surprise me. Every time I form a new opinion, I can’t help but laugh at how different it is from that scared girl in high school.
The series that I’m writing now, I’ve carried with me through this journey. I got the base of the idea over a decade ago, and even then, I knew it was something special. I played with it here and there, wrote some scenes, background stories, character studies, etc. But I knew I wasn’t ready to take it on fully, yet. I knew the idea needed to grow more, it needed time to develop.
In 2017, I participated in NaNOWriMo for the first time, and it was the first time in years that I had seriously written. When I was trying to decide what to write, I looked again at this little idea I had been carrying with me, and I knew it was time. That first NaNo was a test. If I couldn’t spend an entire month dedicated to a story that, by this point, felt like it was a part of me, then I needed to move on. Move on from the story, move on from writing.
It was that idea that fueled me through 50,000 words. Most of which was a mess, but to me, it was the best work I’d ever done. I felt more accomplished at the end of that month than any other moment in my entire life. I was more ready than I could ever hope to be.
Since then, I have honed, researched, and mapped out the five-book series. Every step of the way has been a joy, and every piece of this story has a part of me. That’s not to say that this story is my story. It is entirely separate from me, and yet everything I am. Some of the characters are inspired by the people I’ve encountered in my life, and many of the settings are familiar places to me. Though every author draws from their own life to shape their work. But I want this story to be more than me, to be bigger than me.
My deepest desire is for you to love it as much as I do. Whether it inspires you, or speaks to you in a way nothing else has, or even if it’s just a guilty pleasure. I have loved working on it, and still enjoy sitting down everyday to write more of it. I can’t wait to see what the future has prepared for this story, and what undiscovered magic it still holds for me.
P. Greenings
J.R.R. Tolkien
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
