This is a legacy blog post, originally from my previous website, Mouse House Blog. To see more MHB posts, check out the MHB tag here on my blog.
As of today, I’ve been writing for a year straight. By that I mean that every day, for 365 days in a row now, I’ve found at least a little time to write something for me – be it fanfiction, original fiction, blog posts, or even journal entries. The point is that it was for myself – not for school, not for anyone else. I’ve never had a writing streak this long. A few years ago I managed to write something almost every day for a whole summer, maybe four months in total? So I’m really proud of myself for that alone.
Writing is important to me. I’ve always been a storyteller – some of my oldest memories are of constructing elaborate narratives and interpersonal storylines with my toys. Ultimately, storytelling has been the only future path that has ever made sense for me. That said, over the years I’ve been pretty inconsistent in how much work I really put into my writing. I’ve gone months at a time without writing at all. Especially through high school and the years since, I tended to binge-write my way through NaNoWriMo and then spend the rest of the year creatively burnt out, except for the occasional writing spurt every few months.
Last January, I was still in the midst of a year-long depression that I’ve written about before. Something spurred me to start writing (okay, I’ll be honest: I hyperfixated on a TV show and started writing a lot of fanfiction) and it just… worked. For some reason, at that point, writing suddenly did something for me it hadn’t before. When I wrote, I felt like a person again – it was the closest I got to feeling like myself that I’d achieved in ages. I started writing as much as I could fit in every day, desperate to hold onto that feeling. It got to the point that I was sometimes sacrificing schoolwork or sleep because writing was all I could bring myself to do.
I’m grateful to say I’ve gotten a lot better since then. But, writing daily has become really important to me outside of what it did for my depression. For one thing, if it’s really what I hope to do professionally one day, I need to keep practicing! For another, I’ve never been especially good at maintaining good habits, but this has become one and so it means a lot to me that I manage to keep this one going. And even if my depression is passing, it’s still good for my mental health to keep working at this. Also… most days, it brings me a lot of joy and satisfaction.
Since spring, I’ve been working hard on a story inspired by flor. I’ve written plenty about flor already, so suffice to say that I found their debut album very emotionally evocative at a time when I really needed that, and those emotions grew into something much bigger. What started as a short story became a novel during the last NaNoWriMo, and recently I finished editing and rewriting a final draft.
Today, I published it.
Amazon’s self-publishing process is one I’ve considered multiple times before. It finally felt like time to go ahead with it. This story feels like it’s ready to be shared – it’s become what it needs to be, and it’s done the job it needed to do for me personally. I’m ready for other people to read it.
This story has become very personal to me. It’s about anxiety and loneliness, about friendship and human connection and healing. It’s about coming out of your shell, and making commitments to yourself, and learning to push yourself. It’s also about things being uncertain and that being okay, which is something I’m still trying to convince myself to believe.
I’m proud of the end product. I commissioned cover artwork from one of my best friends, someone I’ll have known for half my life later this year, and it’s stunning. The book itself is now available on Amazon – print copies are $8.00 USD (out of which I receive a $1.35 royalty) and Kindle eBooks are $2.99 (out of which I receive $2.05). Also, if you order a print copy, you can get the Kindle version for just $0.99! If you’re interested in it, it would mean the world to me if you checked it out and maybe even left an Amazon review.
I have a lot of things happening in my life right now. I don’t know just yet which project I’ll tackle next or what direction I’m going. But I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, and I’m looking forward to what’s ahead of me.
