My First Story

I was twelve when I self-published my first story.

Don't get too excited, I was twelve. My stories were mostly Goosebumps knock-offs or Replica fanfiction or a mix of the two. Still, I loved it.

When I write, I could be anywhere and anybody. I could be beautiful or ugly or powerful or good or evil. I could be all my characters all at once, living a hundred lifetimes, experiencing everything this world had to offer and more. From a blank page I could create futuristic worlds, fight monsters, have secret magical powers, and I would totally sacrifice myself to save the world, by the way, it's a no-brainer.

Twelve was a magical age.

I remember reading somewhere that there was an interview with R.L. Stine, and somebody asked him how old his main characters were, and his answer was "Exactly twelve."

I loved that.

This exercise made me take a trip down memory lane and look up my old fanfiction account, and sure enough, the story that I published in 2001 was still there. By the way, the year 2001 was twenty-two years ago, in case you needed to be reminded.

Now let me tell you, reading something written by your twelve year old self was an experience.

I would post a link here, but I think my younger self would be absolutely mortified, and I wouldn't want to do that to her.

To say that I cringed internally as I read the dialogue I came up with would be an understatement.

It was titled, vaguely, "You Never Know" and it had a whopping forty reviews, from other (presumably) twelve year olds commenting "this is great!" and one bad review ("this is stupid") along with my first real critique that I still remember to this day: "My only advise is to keep everything in one tense."

I remember taking that to heart, recognizing it as my first constructive feedback as a writer, and even now I still get self-conscious about how I choose and maintain the tense in my writing. Sometimes it just doesn't sound right when you force the tense!

Come to think of it, 2001 was a crazy time. The internet was still the wild wild west, with shady anonymous chatrooms and AOL dial up modems. My parents somehow let me have an online account that I fully controlled, where I could write whatever the heck I wanted, and people, in turn, could write whatever they wanted to me. Needless to say, that could have gone all kinds of sideways.

I don't think I would let any child of mine have such freedom on the internet now, let me tell you.

Fortunately, it seemed, my audience at the time was mostly just other kids, and we had a lot of fun with it. I enjoyed reading the stories by the others, and I looked forward to excited comments to my own stories saying "I can't wait for the next chapter!" and "what's going to happen, tell me, tell me now!"

Then, of course, life happened as it always does. I entered high school, then college, then grad school. I mostly stopped writing during those years, aside from the occasional college assignment, life slowly convincing me that fiction writing was just a pipe dream of sorts. Bills had to paid and all that.

So no, I never did finish that story. Apologies to my younger self and my 2001 readers.

Now, here I am. Hoping to find that hopeful twelve year old girl again, the child who thought she could create entire universes with her pen.

I really hope she's still in there somewhere.