Badge of Writer's Pride

It was only a few years ago that I fully embraced my title as a writer. I used to say I was a singer, dancer, or an actor, which are all skills that I do not have.

I used to be told in school as a kid (and still to this day) that I was(am) exceptional at English. I always kind of shrugged it off and thanked myself for reading so many books as a kid. My fourth grade teacher wanted to put me in the gifted program because of my short stories I shared with her.

I started to realize I was a writer in my first year at a charter school. It was the sixth grade, and we wrote stories frequently. My teacher Mr. John was a natural born story teller, so he encouraged us to write. When our expedition (a semester long subject studied in all areas; math, science, english etc.) was about hunter gatherers, we compiled a class anthology of stories in the perspective of a Native, or a Spaniard. Though my story was historically inaccurate, I got a nice big four on it. (A four is like an A plus in a charter school. They grade by a rubric)

I wrote two other exceptional stories that year. One was about a haunted castle in Scotland (i think) called Los Dukes, and the other about a tsunami victim from the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami. My teacher actually made himself a personal copy to use as a demonstration for kids in the future.

I began to feel cultivated. Like someone had seen my little plot of soil and decided to weed it, and seed it. And during my middle school years, I started to grow. I started taking poetry classes with a locally famous poet, Judyth Hill. She taught me everything I know about poetry. I still have my 8th grade poetry anthology. The best poetry I ever produced came around when I worked with her.

I finally embraced that I was a writer two summers ago, when I started my first novel. It was one of those random ideas you get while sitting down to pee, and I wrote it down as soon as I could. I had the basic idea, but not the starting words. And then it came. I wasn't expecting to get anywhere with it. After I had started writing poetry, I couldn't write stories like I used to. But it went somewhere. I ended up writing 180 pages. For the record, this novel never made it. I got another random inspiration in the shower one morning, which ended up being my new child.

Now, instead of distracting myself with fantasies of becoming a princess, ballerina, actress, rockstar, popstar, dancer, and model, I know I'm a writer. My goal in life is to win a Nobel Prize for writing, (dream big, right?) or at the very least, publish my novel.

Why am I here?

Over the last week, my mom has been raving continuously about her new blog. She found inspiration in the movie Julie & Julia, before then finding the book.
Over the past few days, she kept asking me (quite seriously) to make a blog.
"Mom, I already have a myspace, I think that's good enough," I argued, before then realizing that myspace is a tool used mainly by horny teenaged boys to "ask out" girls, and for horny teenaged girls to show themselves however they so choose. The population of competent, literate people, who actually feel the need to read a blog is a very small one on myspace. So, I decided to create a blogger acount, and voila! here I am.
I was backseat surfing Blogger last night, over my mother's shoulder, and noticed that most blogs on this site have a set theme, or way of writing, or topic it sticks to. I refuse to do that. Life is a random thing, and I do not intend to write three stanza poems on my views of the night sky on a daily basis.
Instead, I plan for this blog to be a concoction of the best goddamned literary stew you ever have devoured with your brain cells. I'll throw in some poems from time to time, short stories that may, or may not pertain to my regular life, rants, insights to my thought process, and maybe even a sentence on my views of World War II.