First Post!

Okay, well, here I go. I've been spending the last couple of weeks holed up in my little nothing-by-nothing room in London researching publishing internships and thinking hard about how on earth I'm going to get my career off the ground. In that time I happen to have read, for about the thousandth time, about the importance of "building a platform" with which to market yourself. This tends to fall under the "advice for aspiring authors" category of most websites, but it seems to me that given the number of publishing people who seem to be on the internet all day, it can't hurt in networking for that career either. Blogging strikes me as a decent way to do that, or at least to begin participating in the community of which I hope someday to be a wildly successful member.

So first a little bit about me. I'm 21 years old. I'm a college student. The last time I blogged was in high school during an attempt to get a certain girl to like me (xanga, anyone?). I write epic fantasy. I've been working on the same novel for 7 years. I first tried to get it published at the age of 16, and, thank God, nobody was interested except for one fake agent who tried to scam me (have you no shame!? I was only 16!). I learn more and more every day about how to construct stories, how to write, how to move people, and how on earth to reach them through the crazy mechanism that is the publishing industry.

Next, about the blog: I intend to share that knowledge with anyone who reads this, in hopes that it might help and encourage others who started where I did (at 14 with huge dreams but nobody and nothing to guide me), and because it might even help keep me focused on my career. Also, the secret egotist in me keeps whispering that someday the legions of scholars studying my life to find out what made me such an amazing author will have a field day with it. Expect to find me talking about everything from my writing and my dreams for it, to failing to get internships, to why serialized Anime is worse than that which has a beginning, middle, and end, to why it might be a bad idea to plan on working full-time in the summer and doing a massive research project at the same time, to the agonies of my World of Warcraft addiction--and expect to hear, strangely, how most of it has taught me something about how to write better.