Once upon a time, there was a ten year old girl who loved to read. Her mother would shake her head as the little girl brought home a stack of books twice her height from the library (no, she was not able to finish reading them all in the two weeks she had them, which is why her library dues slowly began to grow until they were more than $50 by the time she was 15). But she wanted more. So one night she opened up a new word document and began to write a story.
Ten years later, that little girl (who is not so little anymore) is in the midst of a major rewrite of her four-book YA fantasy series, The Windstormian Cycle, specifically the first book of the series, Saving Windstorm. The first draft, completed in 2009, was (in my eyes) abhorrent and needed the biggest edit I had ever done. Fun fact, I wrote it in a 14-type Tahoma font. In purple. You can tell I was very young when I started my authorial journey.
When I started Saving Windstorm, the only thing I wanted out of it was to be able to tell a story I wanted to read, a story that would give me everything I thought the perfect book should have (and it was riddled with funny lines I “borrowed” from other works of fiction [and have since removed entirely] and plenty of cliches). It wasn’t until about half way though the story, when I was about 14, did I realize that writing stories was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to share my stories so that one day I might inspire a new generation of young writers who type their story up in 14-type purple Tahoma font.
It’s been ten years since I’ve begun the journey that turned into Saving Windstorm, and The Windstormian Cycle as a whole, and there were times when I wanted to give up. I thought I wasn’t good enough to do it, for varying reasons; I was too young, too dumb, not talented enough, not lucky enough. But I kept going, because I remember the 10 year old girl with a stack of fifteen books that just wanted more. And I write for that little girl and all little girls who might be able to dream big and do something they might not usually think to do.
