Hi, I’m Sarah

Hi, I’m Sarah. 

You most likely arrived here from one of two places – you’re my real life family and friends, or you read my fanfiction, Political Gain. You could have bought my book (if you did, thank you!), or maybe you were following me way back in the fitness coaching days. Regardless, I’m glad you’re here. Welcome. If this was real life, I’d pour you a cup of coffee and offer you a snack. I love to host, after all. Since this is a virtual deal, I hope you’re comfortable with your favorite beverage. 

There are a lot of new folks around here, so I thought this would be a good time to tell you a little bit about myself. I’ll try to keep it brief. 

I’ve tried a lot of things. I grew up in rural Virginia, forty-five minutes away from everything. I had a great childhood, running barefoot and wild with my cousins. Money was tight and seemed to always be a source of stress of my mom and stepdad. I decided early on that I would go to college “to make money.” I was a horse girl at the time, wanted to major in ‘equine studies’ in college, but I was told “there’s no money in that,” so I decided to be a nurse instead. 

I hated nursing school. Our first clinicals were in a nursing home and I struggled with losing patients. I didn’t like how I was constantly rushed from patient to patient, told not to linger to chat. I’d wanted to work in the NICU, but all it took was two hours of shadowing a nurse there to know it wouldn’t be good for my mental health. Some of those sweet babies were so sick, and some of them were being discharged into less than ideal home environments. I couldn’t do it. After losing a patient I had bonded with at the nursing home, enough was enough. I called my dad from the parking lot and told him I wanted to quit. I’ll never forget what he told me: 

“I’ve been waiting for this call.” 

Then told me not to do something that wasn’t going to make me happy. 

That was a Saturday. I withdrew first thing on Monday. 

There was a brief period in which I considered being a teacher, but if my tenure as a gymnastics coach of young kids is any indicator, it is a very good thing I’m teaching fitness classes instead of children. 

A devastating breakup and a series of serendipitous events kicked off by a coworker casually saying “you should write about music” led me to decide I wanted to be a music journalist. I started a MySpace page (yes, MySpace), figured out how to write for the news, and started working towards transferring from community college to the University of Virginia – in my backyard – to get a degree in media studies. 

Insert more of those serendipitous events that led me to be inspired to move to Nashville despite never so much as putting a toe in the state of Tennessee once I graduated, then to realize there were colleges in Tennessee (who knew?!). I applied to the University of Tennessee, got in, and if you follow me at all, you know I am completely and entirely a Tennessee Vol. 

I honed my journalism skills at UT, taught myself how to build a website, and moved my MySpace work there. I landed a summer internship at Great American Country, then a country music cable channel, now known as Great American Family, that parlayed into a contracting job after college. My goal of moving to Nashville and working as a music journalist was realized. 

Except I wasn’t working full-time as a music journalist and needed to pay the bills so I accepted a job as a social media coordinator for Dollar General’s marketing agency of record. There I was, fresh out of college, managing a major U.S. retailer’s social media strategy. It still blows my mind that they let someone so green have the run of their social media accounts, but I gained invaluable experience, all while working as a music journalist on nights and weekends. 

After two years in Nashville, it felt like it was time to move back home to Charlottesville. I got a job at a marketing agency doing SEO and paid media, continued to grow as a marketer, then got poached by a student travel company where I worked as their digital marketing manager for several years. That job came with a lovely perk of getting to take some really great trips. 

I discovered barre during my time at the SEO agency and started teaching while doing student travel. I loved it, and the dream started to form to own my own barre studio. We had a few false starts, but just as I was starting to get antsy in Charlottesville, the opportunity to move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to open my own studio appeared. I still needed to pay the bills, though, so I took my marketing skills to UNC, working in executive development during the day, running my studio in the early mornings, over lunch, after work, and on weekends. 

Throughout all of this, I was writing fanfiction. I can’t remember not writing something. My kindergarten teacher told my parents she was concerned about my social development because all I wanted to do was sit and copy words out of books. I wish I could tell Mrs. Rearson she didn’t have to worry about that. I’ll talk to a doorknob, so my social skills are just fine. My favorite thing to do as a kid was lay on the floor with a notebook and write stories about princesses and horses while watching Disney movies. 

I begged for a typewriter for my eighth birthday. My parents somehow found one, and I was obsessed with it. My mom sat me down to teach me how to type. I told her “I already know how” and proceeded to show her. I had never been taught. I just – knew how to do it. She was baffled. In third grade, when we were actually being taught how to type, I got in trouble for going rogue and typing out an entire retelling of Aladdin instead of typing our practice sentence over and over. I even printed it out while the teacher lectured me. Mrs. Webb and I had a long, long year. 

My first fanfictions were for a show called Falcon Beach. It aired on ABC Family – now Freeform – and I was obsessed. I stumbled across their fanfiction forum one day, read a few stories, thought “I could do that,” and started writing. That was eighteen years ago. Over the years, I wrote stories for Grey’s Anatomy, Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, Hart of Dixie, Pretty Little Liars, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and, most recently and perhaps most affectionately, Fourth Wing. 

Life has a weird way of working itself out. My barre studio was something I begged and pleaded and prayed and pleaded and scrapped and pleaded for. Once I got it, I hated running it. I loved teaching, building a community, and pouring into my teachers, but all the other “stuff” that comes with small business ownership in a brick-and-mortar setting wasn’t for me. Before I could start to try to find a way out, the universe gave me one. My floor quite literally exploded overnight due to poor construction. It was a wooden dance floor and it entirely popped up overnight, making the studio unusable. Two months later, just as we were starting to plan a grand re-opening after repairs were made, the floor imploded once more. I sought a lawyer and was able to exit stage right. 

Then COVID hit. 

That floor failure was a blessing as we would have never survived COVID as a brand new business. 

I’d also been quietly applying to film school. I’d been writing Sabrina fanfiction for a while by that point, something I picked up again after a long hiatus to cope with losing my mom in April 2019, and kept hearing “you should write for TV” in the comments. I was reading Shonda Rhimes’s Year of Yes and she wrote about how she was told getting into USC’s film school’s MFA program for television writing was harder than getting into Harvard Law and so she decided to “go and do that.” In that moment, I decided the same. I would get into USC’s MFA program. 

For the better part of a year, while juggling a full-time job, the closing of my studio, and navigating losing my mom, I taught myself how to write a script and applied to MFA programs at USC, Champan, LMU, and AFI. Somehow, I got into all four. I was hell-bent on going to USC, but after hours of contemplation, prayer, and talking to people, I chose LMU. It was a three year program instead of two, and it was geared towards being a showrunner which is what I thought I wanted to do. Like Shonda.  

I started film school in fall 2020, smack in the middle of the pandemic. It was virtual, so I stayed in North Carolina for six months longer than planned, worked from home for UNC all day, then joined Zoom classes from 7:00 – 10:00 pm three nights a week. I did my homework on nights I didn’t have school and on weekends, and finally moved to Los Angeles in January 2021. 

At first, I loved Los Angeles. School was still virtual and COVID restrictions were still pretty intense, but I loved being near the ocean, loved the flexibility of my new marketing job at an affiliate marketing agency, and I got back into teaching barre, this time at Pure Barre, after a couple of years off the mic. I loved school, too. I was good at it. I got great feedback on my scripts, loved pitching my projects. One professor pulled me aside after class one day and told me to strongly consider going into development. He himself was an incredibly successful executive producer and I had already started thinking development might be for me. I took his vote of confidence and ran with it. 

January 2022, a year into living in Los Angles and three semesters of grad school down with three to go, I sat at my desk writing my goals for the year ahead. I wrote a travel goal down, then intended to write a financial goal. Instead, this came out of me: 

Move to Nashville. I don’t know why I wrote this, it just felt like I was supposed to. 

Weird, right? 

When I was making my vision board for the year, I put three photos of Nashville on it. That made no sense to me, but it felt right and I always go with my intuition. 

By March, I knew I needed to get out of L.A. I can’t pinpoint when it changed or what changed, but Los Angeles and film school lost its shine. I’ve been navigating General Anxiety Disorder since I was in third grade and health anxiety since my early twenties, but this time, I slipped into a deep pit of high functioning depression that lasted for months. I was fortunate to have access to resources and people to help me through, but it was a hard, hard time. It took a lot of conversations and a lot of prayer, often while going for long walks in the surf at the beach, to realize I needed out of L.A. I talked to that same professor who had championed me, told him I was considering leaving film school. 

Friends, he spoke life into me. 

He’s a candid guy, shoots straight. He’d gotten to know me better and knew my work well. He told me the truth: I would be extremely successful as a development executive and also extremely miserable. “You’re too kind to be happy doing it.” He meant it as the highest compliment, and I accepted it as such. He also told me something I took to heart: “There are plenty of ways to be a writer. Just keep writing.” 

One of the contributing factors to my depression was a series of rejections from jobs in Nashville. I’d worked as some form of marketing manager my entire career and no one wanted to hire me. I felt led to push myself out of my comfort zone and apply for director-level jobs and once I did, I had a few opportunities. I took on a role as a digital marketing director for an agency in Nashville and off I went back to my beloved Tennessee. 

I wasn’t writing fanfiction by then. I was focused on original manuscripts. Every evening, when the day’s work and fun was done, I would come home and work on whatever story I was telling at the time. I started to think about querying agents and what that would look like. 

Ever have a bad stretch of time at a job and apply for new roles in the heat of the moment? Me too. Living in Nashville gave me quick access to Knoxville and I kept finding myself making the two-and-a-half hour drive to Knox for Tennessee games or just to explore. Work was especially rough for a few weeks, and in a moment of desperation for a reprieve, I applied for a few jobs in Knoxville. 

Now I live in Knoxville and work for UT as a director of marketing and communications. 

I’m also a self-published author. I chose to self-publish my debut novel, Off The Record, earlier this year for a myriad of reasons which I’ll get into in another post soon. 

See friends? I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve lived in a lot of states. I’ve tried things, failed at things. I’ve taken a chance, taken a risk, followed a whim. I don’t regret any of it. I believe everything happens for a reason and that we all have a purpose. I truly believe mine is to tell stories. 

And so, here I am, telling stories and still falling more in love with writing every single day. Writing is all I want to do. I daydream about the days ahead when I can walk into a Target and see my books on the shelf or else go on a book tour or attend conventions as an author. I believe in my bones it will happen, someday. I may fall flat on my face time and time again first. My next book might flop. Political Gain as its own original series might flop. Or it might be the project that changes my life.

I won’t know unless I take the risk. 

I’ve done okay taking risks so far. 

What’s one more? 

Or many more? 

Hi, I’m Sarah. I’ve tried a lot of things. I’ve taken a lot of chances. I love to write. 

I hope you’ll stick around to see how this story unfolds.