Merry Christmas From The Grave

Why am I starting a blog? 2 reasons:

1) I'm paying ten bucks a month to publish on this website, and I've just paid my pricey credit card bill (don't ask, let's just say I have very cute clothes and enjoy eating out), and

2) I love talking about myself.

I think, first, I should introduce myself. So welcome to the obligatory introduction post.

My name is Emma Fischer. I'm a college student at the University of Central Missouri, and I study actuarial science. Actuarial science is the study of risk. Many actuaries work for insurance companies, calculating when people die—you know, fun, not morbid-at-all stuff.

A fun fact about me is that I am quite sensitive. I think it runs in the family. My mother jokes that we have too many mirror neurons, which are the neurons in the brain that fire when we see other people expressing emotions. They're the reason that you yawn when your friends do, or that when someone is crying and my mother is in a ten-foot radius, she'll start crying, too.

All-in-all, there's a reason I'd rather not spend my life calculating when people die.

Now, actuaries can do more than work for insurance companies. And insurance covers more than just life insurance, too. There's retirement and, um, house insurance? I'm a freshman, so I haven't taken any classes that deal with insurance, and I'm still leeching off of my parents, so I have very limited knowledge of the insurance world (and the adulting world, too).

So what do I want to do instead of being an actuary?

I want to be a novelist. A fantasy, romance, YA action novelist, to be specific.

I'm currently working on a novel, and I'll drop my query letter here just in the off-chance that one of you darling readers is a literary agent:

Assassin Cato Inciarte always knew finding love would be hard, but he never expected to fall for the woman he was meant to murder.

College student Jasmine Costello is working at her local library when she meets a mysterious man who offers to teach her magic. Jasmine dismisses him, but he pesters her about other dimensions, the rising tensions between two races of supernatural creatures, the god of the afterlife’s plan to use potential war for his own gain, and how she’s the only being alive who can hope to stop him.

Only when Cato comes to kill Jasmine does she realize that everything the man is telling her is true.

Faced with the threat of a country that wants her dead, Jasmine must flee from the human world she knows with Cato in pursuit. Jasmine wants to reject her magic and the reality of other worlds, but with her life at stake and the world on the precipice of destruction, what other choice does she have but to accept the role she’s given?

Yes, it is a great novel and yes, I do believe it can be a bestseller, but I'm afraid that I'd lose your interest if I examine my ego right now (I'm sure I'll write about my issues with self-confidence in a later post, so hold your breath).

Besides daydreaming about fictional characters and agonizing over sentence structure in Google Docs, I do other things. I'm an artist/graphic designer, I write for my school newspaper, I work out (sometimes), and I tutor in mathematics... it's really weird that the majority of my life can be summed up in one slightly long but overall little sentence.

I think I'll end this here with that sprinkle of existentialism, big dreams, and the admittance that yes—oh my gosh I thought my delete key just stopped working (very important for editing) but it's fine I just had to reload the page.

Anyway, thank you so much for reading, and I'll confess my sins next time, so stay tuned.

06/11/2022; hot, clear skies