The most obvious answer ever.

Daily Challenges:
Day 1 – Write some basic things about yourself
Day 2 – 10 likes & dislikes
Day 3 – The meaning behind your Open Diary name
Day 4 – Your day, in great detail
Day 5 – Five places you want to visit and why
Day 6 – What band/musician is most important to you?
Day 7 – Do you read? What are your favorite book?
Day 8 – Pet Peeves
Day 9 – If you could live off of one food and beverage for the rest of your days, what would they be?
Day 10 – Post a picture of your desktop
Day 11 – What is your favorite quote?
Day 12 – Your current relationship, if single discuss how single life is
Day 13 – Three confessions of your choice
Day 14 – Things you want to say to an ex
Day 15 – A photo of someone you fancy at the moment
Day 16 – If the world were to end tomorrow, what would you do with your remaining time on earth?
Day 17 – What do you want to be when you get older?
Day 18 – Name the tv show(s) you have become addicted to
Day 19 – The best thing to happen to you this week
Day 20 – Your definition of love
Day 21 – What kind of person attracts you?
Day 22 – A picture of what you wore today
Day 23 – A letter to someone. Anyone
Day 24 – Would you rather date someone plain with an amazing personality or someone beautiful with a plain personality?
Day 25 – Seven things that cross your mind a lot
Day 26 – How you hope your future will be like
Day 27 – A picture of your handwriting
Day 28 – Do you wish for anything at 11:11? If so, what do you wish for?
Day 29 – Picture of yourself
Day 30 – Anything you want to post

 

Sorry for the delay! I’ve had a lot of life stuff going on lately. Stuff like family drama, yet another Six Flags trip, and a new job opportunity popping up has left me super busy of late, and that doesn’t seem likely to change, since… well…

I’m headed to Las Vegas next week. But for now! I’ll be more consistent.

Now, to the question at hand.

 

What do I want to be? This is a question generally saved for kids, and teenagers.

When I was a kid, all I really wanted to be was a chemist, believe it or not. I’d see chemists on TV mix together weird crazy colored chemicals in beakers and test tubes, and do cool experiments, and I wanted to be just like that. I even had a chemistry set that I got for Christmas one year that I loved playing around with.

Then I hit high school, and discovered that I was bloody awful at the real thing. Being a good chemist requires being good at math, and I am terrible at math, in most forms.  I am nothing if not a realist (most of the time), so I realized that I was either going to be a truly terrible chemist, or maybe I should find something that I was actually good at to pursue.

So I drifted a bit.

Then, one day, my 11th Grade English teacher gave us an assignment to write a short story for class. Most everyone hated it, really. A lot of people just basically stole ideas from popular books, and drifted their way into a decent grade. Me? I loved reading books. I’d already read a library shelf’s worth of fiction already, so I knew the format.

I went home, and wrote an idea about a character I played in Everquest, along with the character of my closest friend in the game. I had a notebook full of paper, and a pen.

I wrote my first short story on 12 sheets of paper, front and back. My wrist hurt by the time I was done, and my fingers refused to close all the way anymore. But I had my first real work of fiction in my hands. Before this, I was a fan of reading, sure. But I thought writers were magical beings, giving us divine gifts that we the readers could never hope to replicate. But after I wrote that story, I had an epiphany. I could do this too. I could write. I had fun doing it. People always want new entertainment.

I wanted to be a writer for a living. And that was that.

I went back to school the next day with my massive stack of paper in hand, confident, and happy. I had a new goal in life, and at the very least, I would impress my teacher, and get an A with my amazing output of words.

A few days later, I got it back. I got an 85. I frantically dug through the pages to find out why. About halfway through, I found it. "COMMA SPLICE: -15". That’s right. I made one tiny mistake of not putting a dot above my comma, and lost all those precious points.

But suffice to say, I have NEVER made a comma splice error ever again.

 

For me to go into more detail would just be me revisiting the same things I’ve said many a time on this diary over the years. I’m at a point now, where I can finally and confidently say that I have both the skill, the ideas, and the work ethic to realistically meet my dream of writing stories for a living. I’ve worked at reaching this point for over half my life now. The ironic thing is that, looking back, I was kidding myself that I was good enough to be a writer when I wrote that first short story. It was terrible, didn’t say anything, and nothing of interest happened.

But it gave me a direction, and a motivation that has really shown me what my true gifts are. Four novels and numerous stories later, I’m prepared to go hard after my dreams, at long last, and do what it takes to reach them.

Do I think I’ll be a New York times bestseller? Nah. That’s a gamble at best.

But do I think I’ll have people who love my characters and stories? Absolutely. I write what I love, and what I love, tons of other people do too. Not rocket science.

And… will any of them have comma splices…?

 

NOPE.