Why I Define Myself As A Writer

I’ve considered myself a writer since I was six years old and able to create sentences with a full understanding of the alphabet. I caught onto things like punctuation, spelling, and grammar really early on. It intrigued me to learn how quotations worked while I was in the classroom because I wanted to be able to add dialogue into the stories I was writing at home.

What started out as playing with my Barbie dolls turned into something I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life. I loved the stories I was thinking of for my Barbie dolls to act out and I didn’t want to forget the fictitious scenes I was coming up with! So I started writing the stories down. I would use my Barbies to act out dramatic scenes and then pause to write everything down as I was going. Soon enough, I realized the Barbie dolls were slowing things down for me. My ideas were flowing far too quickly.

I ditched the dolls (although I did continue collecting them until I was about 12) and I started writing everything I thought of directly onto the pages of notebooks. I would take printer paper out of my parents’ office and fold it in half to create the appearance and feel of a real book. Between the ages of 6 and 12, this was my life.

I was obsessed! I loved creating characters. I loved making my characters do cool things. I loved writing about characters overcoming whatever obstacles were coming their way.

In middle school, I went through a rebellious phase and I didn’t write very much. I was focused on trying to grow up too fast rather than enjoying the carefree life of a child. In high school, I started writing again around age 16. I completed a few short novels that were only about 15,000 words each. (Typical novels run at about 25,000 words each.) In college, I stopped creatively writing so much because I was forced to write BORING & STUPID college essays.

To this day, I have negative feelings against about 98% of my professors for butchering all artistic freedom and blocking any ounce of individual expressionism I had between the ages of 18 and 23. I took a gap year when I was 21 after getting out of an abusive relationship with a sociopath. During that year off school, I worked as a Starbucks barista, I worked at Victoria’s secret, and I worked as a childcare provider at a movie theater. Although I was busy working, I wasn’t being bogged down by mindless college essays. My creativity re-sparked and I was able to write a novel! That’s the year I wrote Block His Number & Be Free, my most popular novel to date. It now has almost 28,000 readers. For some perspective, unknown authors are lucky to get around 1,000 readers… so having 28,000 readers is beyond amazing. I couldn’t be happier.

Fun update! A company called ByteDance scoped out my novels online and PAID me to be able to feature my novels on their book reader app, Fictum. I couldn’t be happier. One or more of my novels will be made into a movie or TV show soon. I manifest that into my reality.