To start off any good story, you need a prologue. So to start, I too will have a prologue of sorts. I was born in Independence, Kansas, and I lived there until I was four years old. From there I moved to Ankeny, Iowa, and I lived there for a year. Then I moved to Granger, Iowa, and lived there for a year as well. After that I moved to Bucyrus, Kansas, and lived there for three years.
I currently reside in Orlando, Florida where I am in the 9th grade. I was the editor and columnist in journalism class and on the yearbook staff in middle school. I have been the featured author at a couple literacy nights in Central Florida. I love to write all types of stories and genres, read books whenever I can, and draw. I’ve also been dancing since I was five years old and that’s a passion I continue today as I’m on the dance team at my high school. Some other things about me is that I love horse back riding and have been doing it since I could walk (if that wasn’t evident by the characters I have in my books). I also love to travel like most adventurous people do.
Now this is where my writing story really began, chapter one. Everywhere else that I had lived I would love to be creative and imaginative, like most young kids did. I didn’t read too much and I was all too young to put together full paragraphs and essay wasn’t a word in my vocabulary.
I guess when we moved to Bucyrus I somehow started to see what I loved. I realized I loved to read and started to do that more often, I also started dance my first year we lived there. So I guess my love for reading initially sparked my desire to become an author at my young age. Now don’t get me wrong, I did not decide at the age of eight that I wanted to publish a three hundred page book, I didn’t have the brain capacity to think a child could do anything but be a child.
But the inspiration for this really came to life in third grade. That year I was ‘Librarian for a Day’ at my school, where I basically got to skip class for a day to hang out in the library. Third grade I also wrote a fiction story about a fairy and her pegasus; I drew pictures for it and everything. I also wrote many other short stories and my original poem ‘Birdies’ was published in the 2014 Young American Poetry Digest. I was then further encouraged by my third grade teacher to write letters to a couple authors and I was so happy when I heard back from them. Being an author was one of those things where I thought it would be cool to do when I grew up. But anyhow, those letters motivated me even more to become a writer.
It was then a year later, I was in fourth grade and I was still figuring out where I stood in the writing world, then we moved again, this time to Orlando, Florida. It was there that I started to see what I was really capable of. It was the end of the year and the teacher assigned a short story assignment. We researched and planned for it and everything, some of us even drew sketches. I think the story was supposed to be maybe five pages, I ended up writing eighteen and I soon was telling my parents that I wanted to publish it. They were a bit surprised but said that I could work at it and so I wrote some more and then forgot about it.
Then in 5th grade my teacher suggested that I participate in the unique and award-winning Page 15 Young Writers Summer Camp, which rekindled my passion to become a published author and I worked on it a bit more during my time at camp. I have been going to camp every summer since.
Almost two years later, I brought it back out and finished it, publishing my first book in sixth grade. I was able to get my second book in the series out the summer before my eighth grade year. And ever since that, I have been hooked and plan to continue writing, maybe even publish through a actual publisher instead of self-publishing.
I already have plans of finishing this series by the time I graduate high school and start on a stand alone once I’m done with that. After all of that, I’ll see where writing takes me…