How Long Have You Been Writing?
“How long have you been writing?”
I get asked that question often enough. I kept my writing under the radar for a long time, didn’t tell many people about it. I had a whole online life at one point that my real life friends and family knew nothing about. It suffices to say that my “alter ego” as a writer caught a lot of folks off guard. Yet I’ve been writing my entire life. Writing has never been something I thought about. It has always been something I did.
When I heard about the passing of Jason David Frank – best known as Tommy Oliver, the green/white Power Ranger – I was reminded of just how early I started writing. I was a massive Power Rangers fan. I woke up early on Saturday mornings to watch new episodes, raced home from school to catch the reruns. I had a plethora of Power Rangers toys, including all the Zords which in turn connected to form the all-important Megazord. My cousins and I would make up Power Rangers games – I was always the pink one – and going to see the Power Rangers movie in theaters was an entire event.
Power Rangers was also the first time I fell in love with a couple on television.
Tommy and Kimberly were the it couple as far as my third grade heart was concerned. I loved their romance and when the show would end, I would pull out my notebook with the Power Rangers cover and write stories about them. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was my first foray into fanfiction.
My favorite part of the school year was always the Young Authors competition in the spring. We were tasked with writing our own “books” and our teachers would even help us bind them. I wrote epic tales about horses and adventurous girls. Magic and fairies made frequent appearances. I loved a fairytale – still do. Our “books” would then be entered into a competition and a few weeks later, we would find out the winners. I always placed, even won a few years. I still have the certificates in a trunk at my dad’s house to prove it.
When I was around twenty, I fell in love again, this time with Falcon Beach, a show on then ABC Family, now Freeform, about a group of teenagers spending their summer at the beachside town of Falcon Beach. Half of them were working class locals. The other half were the wealthy kids who came to town for a few months of vacation. Worlds collided and sparks flew. Jason Tanner, the local golden boy, and Paige Bradshaw, the driven rich girl, were magnetic.
I remember the moment it happened clearly.
I was at my mindless full time job in medical records, waiting around for the phone to ring with someone needing a medical record number and ignoring the homework I could have been doing. I was also going to school full time at the time and time was precious – I needed to maximize every minute to do a good job at work and maintain my 4.0 average. So naturally I was clicking around on the internet and stumbled across the Falcon Beach website.
It was a snazzy site, ahead of its time with its interactive design, games, and forums. The show was music-driven and the site utilized that music. It even had a Sims-like area to move about Falcon Beach where the cast would sometimes pop in to hang out. I had never really gotten into the whole online chat thing, but as I skimmed the forums, one board in particular caught my eye:
Fanfiction.
Curiosity got the best of me. I clicked into it and started reading threads. People were writing their own fictional stories about Falcon Beach. I thought “hmm… I can do that…” and threw together a few messy paragraphs. I posted it and let it be. People read it. Asked for more. So I wrote more. The next thing I knew, I was using every spare second to write absolute epics of stories, even a full-on series. They were so dramatic and over the top, but I loved the community and reading other stories by my friends. In fact, the Falcon Beach fanfiction board is how I met one of my longest friends, Kathryn.
I branched out from there. I wrote fanfiction for Grey’s Anatomy. (Meredith and Derek) Gossip Girl. (Chuck and Blair) Hart of Dixie. (Wade and Zoe) Vampire Diaries. (Damon and Elena). I was obsessed and couldn’t stop. I also started writing my own stories. My first manuscript is a disaster of a three-part series about a country music journalist and a country music star that will never see the light of day unless I do some serious editing. Let’s just say I didn’t understand how to “write tight” back then.
My fanfiction days fell away as my favorite TV shows ended and I focused more on original work. And then it happened again. I fell in love with another television couple. This time, it was Nick and Sabrina from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
It was April 2019. My mom died on April 12th. It was pouring outside, flooding, cold. I was numb and so very tired of answering phone calls and accepting well-meaning yet empty feeling condolences. I had two more episodes of the second part of Sabrina left and so I turned off my phone and settled in. Nick and Sabrina’s relationship was thrown into a spiral as he admitted to working with the Dark Lord to sway her to the Path of Night. As he stood in her bedroom and begged for forgiveness, I swooned. She was still angry, but his remorse was palpable. Then they went to battle and he sacrificed himself as the vessel to hold the Dark Lord in the name of saving Sabrina. His last words before handing himself over? “I love you, Spellman. You taught me how to love.”
Even in my own heartbreak, I swooned.
And in the final moments of the last episode of the season as Sabrina declared “Let’s go to hell and get my boyfriend back, I cheered.
A few days later, desperate for a reprieve from funeral planning and my well-meaning family and friends, I retreated to my bedroom at my dad’s and opened up a blank word document. For the first time in a long, long time, I wrote a piece of fanfiction, a one-shot chronicling Nick and Sabrina’s reconciliation. I posted it on whim on my old go-to, Fanfiction.net, and a new-to-me site, Archive of Our Own, closed my laptop, and went to bed. The next morning, I woke up to an inbox flooded with reviews – most of which asked me to write more. I wrote 13 total stories for the Sabrina fandom over the next two years.
Yes – 13.
13 messy, unedited stories full of heart, love, and magic.
Somewhere along the way, I took the “you should write for television!” comments to heart and applied to film school. I casually got accepted to four of the top 10 programs in the country and off to Los Angeles I went to pursue a career that, as it turns out, wasn’t for me.
I was also working on my own manuscripts.
In the last year, I’ve completed two manuscripts that are actual “get these published” contenders. I’m nearing the end of a third that I believe will fall into that same category. There’s a saying that the thing you do in your free time is the thing you’re meant to do. There is also a belief that the things you loved in your childhood are the things you should be doing as an adult. I spent my childhood writing and playing house – I’m meant to be a writer, a wife, and a mom.
Wow, the chills that went through me when I wrote that…
And so, when asked how long I’ve been writing, that’s my answer: my whole life. With no plans to stop. But with plans to do something about it. I’ve been quietly working on my query letter for one of my manuscripts and researching agents to begin querying in January. My dream? To be published and then in turn have my books optioned for TV shows/movies.
The good thing about dreams?
They can come true.
Now, back to writing.
