Hello everyone, thanks for stopping by! You might know me from my other blog Autumn2May or you may have found me from some other corner of the internet. My name is Jennie and as you can see from my profile, I am a lot of things. Right now, specifically, I am a writer. I'm not published yet, but I am currently working on finishing my first book. I’ve started this blog, so I have a place to write about, well, writing, without scaring off all my Etsy buddies on my other blog.
My book is a sci-fi/fantasy story about a girl who gets stuck in an alternate universe and needs to find her way back. I got the idea from a dream I had in October of 2010 and my husband said it was such a cool idea, that I should write it down. I'd never written anything before, so I was slightly hesitant, well more like very hesitant, to try to write a story. Then I discovered NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Every November, totally insane returning authors and unknowing first timers (i.e. me), take the challenge to write a 50,000 word (or longer) novel in 30 days, starting on Nov 1 and ending on Nov 30. This was not only perfect timing but also an interesting challenge. There is a huge possibility that if I had not found NaNo when I did, I might never even have started this book. I ended up 'winning' NaNo, but my story wasn't finished yet, so I kept going, the whole time completely amazed I was actually doing this.
For a little more background on why it's weird to me that I'm currently writing a book, let me tell you a story. In elementary school, I failed spelling class for the year. I turned in maybe two homework assignments and almost didn't graduate to the next grade. It wasn't because I was lazy or stupid, I just couldn't spell. The school tested me to see if maybe I had a problem that was causing me to have such trouble with this subject, but found nothing. Luckily for me, they let me graduate and we moved soon afterwards to a new, and better, school district. They re-tested me and found I was partially dyslexic and had a cognitive impairment that made it harder for me to learn the way everyone else did.
It was such a relief to find out that I wasn't crazy and that words (and numbers) were not really my enemy. By high school, I was in all regular classes and had figured out how to successfully deal with my impairments. But I was still a terrible speller and the nuances of grammar completely eluded me 75% of the time. I liked writing poetry. I loved reading. But writing itself was never something I really thought I would ever enjoy, never mind be successful at.
Computers are what eventually got me interested in writing, even though I didn’t know it at the time. My dad is a computer programmer and we've had at least one computer in our house since 1982. Since there were always computers, once word processors came into existence, there was always spell check. Then grammar check was added to that and I was in heaven! Now I could actually write and not have people give me strange looks when they read what I wrote. I learned to touch type in elementary school and middle school and perfected the skill on AIM in high school and college. I was ready for the next step, actually writing for fun.
I took a website design class in college so they would finally let me graduate, and as our class project we had to set up a simple website using HTML. I ended up making a family website to share pictures and stories. It was loads of fun! We set them up on Geocities (remember Geocities?), and I kept it mostly up to date, until they closed the site a few years ago. I also ended up with a LiveJournal before Facebook became all the rage and found I really loved writing lit bits of things here and there.
It all came to a head in 2009, when I gave birth to my youngest son. I found I suddenly had a lot of free time that I couldn't fill by watching TV or reading, as now it came in 10 or 15 minute spurts throughout the day. I decided to open an Etsy store and make crafts to sell online. I could create them in my spare time and sell them to make a few extra bucks on the side. After being on Etsy for a few months I found that most successful shop owners also had blogs outside of Etsy. I didn't really post on LiveJournal anymore and Facebook had made my website obsolete, I thought a new place to posted about what was going on in life would be a nice change from watching children's programming ALL DAY. So, I started my Etsy blog.
It started off a little choppy, but after I grew into it blogging became one of my favorite things to do. It didn't occur to me until after I started writing my story (almost a year later) that it wasn't the blogging in and of itself I liked, it was the writing part that had me hooked. I've had my other blog for over a year now, and except a few dead spots when we moved last February, I've posted on it every single week.
So now here I am, a writer, 130,000 words into finishing her first book and opening up a second blog dedicating to writing. This is somewhere I never thought I'd be, doing something I had never even considered liking. I hope I end up being good at it because, now that I've started I don't think I could stop if I want to.
Thanks again for stopping by, and I promise my posts from now on will be a little less rambling.
Have a great day! :)
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