Happy Writing Wednesday, folks!

First off all, thanks to everyone who stopped by my first Memorable Monday post, and showed Kyra Lennon some love! I'll be back next Monday with a guest post from Beyond Starlight author Diana Dawn.

Today, I'm going to talk about when and why I started writing, the journey I took to self-publishing, and what writing means to me.

I always told stories, but at first, they weren't written. When I was younger, I'd play 'pretend' either with my younger sister or the girls of a similar age who lived on my street. We played games where we were princesses. We pretended to be school teachers. We acted out scenes where we had romantic interests.

Also, from a young age, I believed in magic. I thought there were fairies at the bottom of the garden. I was convinced there was more to the world than what we currently know or see. I still believe that, actually.

As I got older, I started to notice boys, and I needed an outlet for that. Please don't laugh because this is totally cringe, but from ages 14-16, I had a HUGE crush on my science teacher. In addition to trying my hardest in his classes, I also had a secret story I worked on *every night* about a girl who had magical powers (because of course she did), who made her teacher fall in love with her.

I don't remember the exact story, and fortunately (or unfortunately) I don't have it anymore. I DO remember it was hand-written in an A4 pad of lined paper that I kept hidden under my mattress.

I didn't write anything else during that period, but that spark of wanting to do something creative was always there within me. When I got my GCSE results and realized I'd gotten Ds in science, rather than the predicted Bs, meaning I couldn't study science in college, I was left with a question:

What did I want to do?

My crush on the aforementioned science teacher had faded by this time, and honestly, so had my interest in science.

When the careers advisor at college asked what I wanted to do, all I could think of was 'journalist.' I liked stories. I liked reading stories. I liked telling stories.

English had been my highest-graded subject at secondary school (again, I had a crush on the teacher. But I loved the subject matter too). I was only one of two people who had gotten an A-grade on their Romeo and Juliet-themed oral exam, and I had been complimented on my creative writing assignment about a birthday where I'd spent some of my money getting my younger sister a plush toy rabbit and earned a discount on some jewelry I was buying (true story).

With the encouragement of the careers advisor, I enrolled in a media studies course. Through media studies, I found many aspects I loved, such as filming and directing. The story was always my favorite thing, though, and I greatly enjoyed the project where we had to film a short story. Mine was about a group of friends having a tarot reading and one of them getting the death card. Totally on brand for me!

Around the same time, I also developed a love for Alfred Hitchcock movies. I especially liked The Birds and loved his use of suspense in the films. 

I remember being on holiday with my family, and telling my aunt I wanted to be a film director. 

Due to ADHD (which is another story for another day), I dropped out of college without completing the Media Studies course and enrolled at a different college. This time around, I picked film studies, English literature, and psychology.

The English literature course was ... weird. Our tutor had a monotone voice. He locked the classroom door to prevent latecomers from entering, and he made us study Charles Dickens. All in all, I wasn't loving his class.

Film studies was AMAZING. I aced the unit we did analyzing the movie CLUELESS, and I greatly enjoyed filming a murder mystery story (inspired by the then-current WWE/F storylines).

But ADHD strikes again, and I failed all my exams.

I wasn't sure what I'd do next, but it didn't matter. It was the summer holidays, and I had a new boyfriend.

I spent a lot of time with him at his uni-shared house. He spent a lot of time doing drugs and sleeping during the day. Left alone, with only a computer with no internet as entertainment, I did two things. I made those cute little pixel dolls that were popular in the late 90s/early 2000s. When I wasn't making pixel dolls, I wrote. I don't remember the story exactly, but I think art imitated life, and it was about a girl frustrated with her relationship. She probably had magical abilities, too.

In the early 2000s, lots of life-changing things happened to me, including meeting the love of my life and having an on-off relationship with them, which resulted in me being pregnant at 19. One of my constants during that time was books.

While my feelings about JK Rowling have changed since her true, anti-trans ideology has come out, I am not ashamed to admit that reading Goblet of Fire during the summer of 2002 kept me from falling into a deep depression.

At the same time, I discovered Anne Rice and fell in love with her vampires and witches and the wonderful worlds she created.

Around the time my oldest child was born, I discovered the most wonderful thing ever - FanFiction!

I was searching for information on the Harry Potter series and found the official WB's site, where there was a role-play forum. I role-played as a former lover of Snape! lol From there, I found other H.P. sites, such as MuggleNet and the Chamber of Secrets Forums.

I wrote my Snape-loving fanfic and rightly got flamed for the terrible writing! I did what all normal people do when they're told their writing is terrible, with multiple spelling mistakes, and their main character is a Mary Sue. I made a new account.

Through fanfiction.net, I discovered WWF/E fanfiction. My first story was once again terrible. But as well as getting flames (aka bad reviews), I got helpful comments too. Another, older, more experienced author offered to beta-read my story. For many years, this writer and I were great friends, and even co-wrote a story together. We sadly lost touch, but she holds an important place in my heart.

She wasn't the only writing friend I made online. Over on the Chamber of Secrets Forums, I met the woman who would one day become one of my best friends, and prolific writer Kyra Lennon. I was in love with her Marauders and MudBloods fanfic, and it inspired me to re-write my Snape-lover story. Only this time, I had moved on from Snape, and the object of my OC's desire was Regulus Black.

At this time, a number of factors became clear:

I liked writing romantic stories. I often had (and still do) celebrity or fictional character crushes. I know now it's part of how my ADHD manifests in my life. My outlet for these crushes was writing a story where me (or at least, a version of me) and the object of my desires got together. And of course, there was drama and obstacles.

I liked 'magical' fantastical stories. As much as I loved WWF/E, I couldn't leave Harry Potter behind. I also wrote stories based on the TV show LOST. And once again, my OC had magical abilities. Then I discovered fantasy RPG video games, like the Elder Scrolls series and the Dragon Age series, and that inspired me even more.

Around 2012, my love of fanfiction was declining, and self-publishing was becoming a thing. Every aspiring author was on Blogger, talking about their characters, doing blog tours, and giving out awards.

I was part of it, and in 2012, I moved from fanfiction to original writing when I took part in NaNoWriMo for the first time and wrote my first original story, DESTINY'S ROAD. I won't talk too much about DESTINY'S ROAD, as it deserves its own blog post. But, much like my first fanfiction, my first original fiction was not good.

I said the word "penis" about 50 times in the epilogue alone!

The concept was good, though. It was about a magical orphan who learned they were related to royalty and had to come into their power to save the world. My MC also had red hair and green eyes, something many of my protagonists have, even to this very day. I blame Jean Grey!

Over the next five years, I jumped from story to story, until I eventually published my contemporary-romance novel ALL IT TAKES in 2017, which was actually inspired by an old, never-published WWF/E fanfiction I'd written.

Due to ADHD, I didn't publish another book until 2020. But my computer is full of half-finished stories and first drafts. Some are contemporary-romance, others are paranormal-romance. I always felt drawn to both genres, and I know I will likely always bounce between the two.

As I've mentioned a few times in this post, I have (or strongly suspect I have) ADHD, and that's caused me many challenges, mostly losing interest in stories before they're complete, and time management. For a LONG time, I thought I was a bad writer who would never amount to more than two published books and a handful of short stories.

The irony is, I wrote over 40 novel-length stories as a ghostwriter from 2019-2023. ADHD had an effect there, too, and I began to despise writing.

I quit ghostwriting, sought out an excellent ADHD coach, and started on a journey of self-reflection and learning how my unique brain operates.

Thanks to coaching, I now feel much more confident in my ability to complete stories. I know how to motivate myself. I know what goals are important to me. I have high hopes for my future as a writer. So high, in fact, that I have signed up for a number of collections/shared-world books to be released over the next ~two-ish years.

Some of them, such as THE STARLIGHT PRINCE, and its tie-in short story THE ADVENTURES OF JOSAIN JOVENNE, I talk about regularly. Others, not yet, but I will reveal more in due course.

I've come a long way from the girl who used to pretend to be a princess and imagined she had fairies at the bottom of her garden. But some things remain constant - I love stories (both reading and telling), I feel drawn to romance, and many of my stories have a touch of the unusual.

In another post, I'd like to discuss WHY writing and reading are so important to me and why I believe stories (be they books, TV shows, comics, video games) are so vital as an escape.

But this was my author origin story. For future Writing Wednesday posts, I will explore other aspects of my writing journey, including looking at long-forgotten stories (like the aforementioned Destiny's Road). I will also talk about my current works in progress and how having both ADHD and being autistic has affected me as an author.

That's all I have for you for now. Thank you for reading, and please join me this Friday for Favourites Friday, where I discuss some of my most loved TV shows.

Until then,

Take care and stay creative,

T.T.F.N