The Beginning

For a long while, I was under the impression that writing was a dead passion for me. Though I had been writing since the 3rd grade, I hadn't really written anything substantial in years. The furthest any project of mine had gotten was 47 pages on Microsoft Word, and that was something I had written in 7th grade. By the time I entered my freshmen year of college, I was convinced that, while I used to love writing and could write well, I had lost all interest/talent that I may have once had.

I remained living in that world until November of 2008. At the start of the month, I started thinking about writing again, and I tried to write a few times, but I was largely unsuccessful. But one night near the end of the month, I arbitrarily wrote down a one-page piece of work. It was clear that it was the beginning of a story, but as to what the story was I had no idea. I never intended to do anything with the piece of writing--it was just something for fun, and after all, I had no plot to continue with anyway.

I started thinking about the story from 7th grade, and how far it had gotten. Though I had come up with them when I was 13, I still loved my characters, and I wished I could find someway to utilize them again--but the plot seemed silly to me now, and I couldn't figure out how to rework it. After I had given up, I was at work one day, bored out of my mind, when it hit me. I suddenly saw how I could make the story work, how I could update the characters, and where I could set it. I realized that the one-page piece of work from a few days ago could become my prologue. I wrote the first chapter a couple of days after that.

I started in late November, and finished on June 28th, 2009 at 110,000 words. My genre is Young Adult Fantasy. As of today, I am almost halfway done with my edit of the first draft. I have the skeleton of a query letter than needs some serious work, but I have a decent list of agents that I want to query. Right now I'm continuing to edit the first draft, and when I've finished that I plan on reworking the query letter--after that, and once I feel the manuscript is ready, I will begin querying!

So, sans the life story up there, that's exactly what this blog will be doing: chronicling my writing endeavors as I take my first foray into the extremely intimidating and seemingly cutthroat world of publishing. On the way, I'll post my thoughts on writing as well as things I learn as I grow and mature as a writer. Hopefully there will be advice and ideas that can help you learn and grow as a writer too!

The blog is called Writer By Night because I do a large part of my writing after the sun has vanished into the west, holed up at my favorite coffee shop until four in the morning. I do write during the day, but much less often. As for now, because I'm just starting out and returning to school, I'm afraid that there won't be much of a structure with my posts. They'll tend to be sporadic, but it is my intent to post as often as I can.

Thank you for reading and tagging along on my adventure with me!