Time for a long, reflective post

In a previous blog (that I've since imported over to this blog if you're truly curious to run through my archives), I used to write about my aspirations to become a YA lit acquisitions editor. I used to cruise YA editor, agent, and librarian blogs and once applied for an internship to Random House. Was it Random House? I don't even remember. Up until I met Seve, I was pretty determined to move to New York after graduation and fumble, grow, learn, and mature into a fantastic editor. Marrying Seve changed those plans as I accommodated his dreams into my life as well, which meant staying in Rexburg so he could finish school. I now find myself a copywriter/marketer/advertiser/PR guru for a software company in Idaho, and I'm quite happy with that, though it doesn't bring me anywhere near discovering and publishing the next J.K. Rowling.

So my dirty little secret is that I like to write as well, and no, not just my obvious technical writing, but fiction. It's something I did a lot in high school and my early college years. My high school friends were all into writing and we'd share stuff with each other. We even tried to start a zine once, and later a "prose mix" group, where you make a mix tape and then write a story for each song, then create a quarter zine for it that we'd pass around the group. It was so much fun, but as the years have gone by, I found myself embarrassed to admit this passion to anyone, and it died out after China.

In China I told all the volunteers about NaNoWriMo (from which Water for Elephants was brought to fruition), and they loved it so much we all decided to write "China novels." There was no real word count goal, just "write a novel," and the time span for completion was just our semester abroad.  We all bought paper journals to fill our novels with, and only one girl actually finished hers. It was a hilarious retelling of our time in China with each of us as featured characters.

Anyway, during my recent time off I went back and read my China novel. It practically brought me to tears, not because it was amazing but because it reminded me how much I love writing. How did I ever let this go? And actually, yeah, I thought my story was pretty good, so I've decided to just finish the thing. And I can't go much longer reading Sam's tales of query wars before wanting to just jump in and join the bloodbath myself.

Oh, and, uh, Happy 4th! Hope everyone had a good one. We went to the skate park, haha.