Writing

I am a writer and I have been for many years now. Writing for me is like reading a book: it takes me away from my crappy life into another person's crappy life that we all know will end up not so crappy in the end.

But writing is more fulfilling than reading because I get to choose what happens to the person with the crappy life. Perhaps I don't want my character to have a crappy life at all. I can write that. Perhaps I want my character's life to be so crappy that I won't feel so bad about mine anymore. I can write that.

Someone asked where I got my inspiration to first start writing. I don't think it was really a specific thing, person or moment, but rather an accumulation of those things. I can't remember the day I started writing or why. I do remember in my early days of writing that I wrote because I wanted to know more about what I was reading or I wanted to have my wild dreams and fantasies become real and the only way I could do that was to write it down.

Most of my story ideas come from books I've read recently. I will read a book and like the setting or the characters or whatever, so I will start writing my own story with whatever I liked from the book in it. It's not fanfiction, it's more of a desire to see more, learn more, experiment more.

My point in all this is that I don't have a set inspiration for what I write. Sometimes the most random thing can inspire something big and grand for me. My whole NaNoWriMo novel in 2010 was inspired by a single scene in an ANGEL episode. Most of my short stories are inspired by songs: sometimes the whole song, sometimes just a single line.

But whatever my inspiration for writing, and whatever keeps me writing, I'm just glad that I have something I love to do that nobody can take away from me. Except maybe Amy, who I'm incredibly jealous of.