Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer. While this is
true, this isn’t where my story begins. My story starts a bit further back. In
the 2nd grade actually.
When I was in the 2nd grade, being a writer had
never crossed my mind. I simply devoured whatever chapter books I could get my
hands on and wrote cute, little, terrible stories about bunnies and kites.
Then I began homeschooling. Our initial homeschooling
curriculum left much to be desired. In other words, we did two hours of school
a day. I spent most of my time reading. If I had a decent-sized chapter book,
like Ramona and Beezus, I could
finish it in a day. I began working my way through the Little House in the Big Woods series.
When I was 10, I got an itty, bitty laptop for Christmas. It
didn’t have any virus protection, and I never figured out how to connect it to
the internet, so I just used it to write a smattering of terrible, uncompleted
stories that remind me of how far I’ve come. If I’d had any idea how terrible I
was, I would’ve stopped. But I didn’t know, so I kept writing. I wrote about DS
games, Legos, and evil babies trying to take over the world. The antagonist was
a dentist. When I was younger, I’d gone to the dentist and had 13 cavities
filled at once. Let’s just say I was a bit salty about that.
Then school slammed me like a pro wrestler. I went through a
season where I devoted myself entirely to academics, and the flood of novel
reading and writing slowed to a trickle. I had two short story assignments
during that time, and they reminded me of how passionately I loved writing.
Once summer, when I was 15, I got hooked on reading again,
particularly romance. I’d dabbled in fan fiction a little. I’d tried a Star
Wars one, but the idea had fizzled with little results to show for the few
chapters I’d written. Then I heard about a fan fiction called Jelsa, Jack Frost
and Elsa. I thought that was weird.
Really weird.
Jack Frost is 14, and Elsa is
21, though Jack is always older in the fan fictions. I was right: they were
quirky. After reading a few fan fictions, I stopped and thought, I can do better than that. A grand total
of two Jelsa books, 191,625 words, 1,146 reviews, 217 followers, and 261 story
favorites later, I had done better. With the external encouragement from the
reviews, I summoned enough motivation to finish my first stories. Throughout
fall, I wrote every single day, about two hours per day. When I missed one day,
my readers would demand more, so I met those demands. I was thrilled. People
actually liked what I’d written, and so did I. Maybe, just maybe, this passion
could go somewhere. I decided to get serious about this.
After hours and hours of research over Christmas break on
helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com, I’d outlined my first original story. January
2nd, 2015, I published my first chapter. My stomach was twisting in knots all
day. I knew people would hate it. Two reviews trickled in. I kept writing.
Then my dad told us we were moving, with three months notice.
Both my writing and school were crippled as I spent all day working on the
house. During the summer, I finished my book, gaining 530 reviews, 113
favorites, and 141 follows. People liked this story, so I figured I might as
well publish it and make some money on the side, right?
During the summer of 2015, I bought a book: Go Teen Writers: How to Turn Your First
Draft into a Published Book. If I was going to publish this story myself,
it was going to be top-notch. But then I read about traditional publishing,
agents, and something entirely foreign and unheard of: writer’s conferences. I
didn’t know they’d existed. The book mentioned ACFW, so I thought I’d check it
out.
I joined Scribes, where I met Laurie, and eventually
migrated to a smaller critique group. While I was on ACFW, I saw that they had
a conference coming up. I filled notebooks up with research and information. I
rewrote my book before the conference: 90,000 words in twelve days, from
beginning to end.
I attended the conference, made connections with agents and
writers, learned about the craft, and met Francine Rivers. After leaving the
conference, I knew I had to start building my platform: I needed a blog.
The first time the blog Lands Uncharted was ever mentioned
was in an email with Laurie, where she said, “If you ever have any interest in
doing a group blog in addition to your personal blog, let me know :)” That
was in November 2015, and by January 2016, Lands Uncharted officially launched!
I won a free, professionally-designed personal blog from
KikaDesign, and it launched officially in February 2016.
I posted the original story again online—this time on
WattPad, where I now have 129,000 views, 8,200 likes, and 1,000 comments.
During summer, I went to both the Realm Maker’s Conference, which I heard about
from writers attending ACFW, and the 2016 ACFW conference.
After getting my editorial review back from Nadine Brandes
earlier this year, I had a hunch my manuscript needed some serious overhaul. It
was lacking a definitive character arc—the pinnacle of a good novel. I’m still
in the process of that rewrite.
That covers my writing journey over the past 10 years. It’s
amazing where God can take you in that amount of time. What journeys has God
taken you on in the last 10 years?
Thanks for reading!
We wanted to let you know about a few changes happening here at Lands Uncharted as we move into March (and hopefully spring!). As you may have seen, Elizabeth Newsom wrote a post a little over a week ago bidding us farewell. Elizabeth has been with Lands Uncharted since the very beginning and has blessed us so much with her insight and humor. We're sad to be losing her, but we hope to reel her back in for a guest post every once in a while :) Check out her website to follow her future updates.
Fortunately, we also have some good news. Elizabeth Jane Kitchens (who will be known as Lizzie around the blog, to avoid "Elizabeth" confusion) will be joining us as a regular blogger! Yay!!! You may have seen her here before - she did an interview with us last year, and her YA fantasy novel, The Beast's Enchantress, has come up in several of my posts (my full review is here, and I also discussed it in Top 3 Books I Read in 2016).
