Better question, who are you? I guess that's something we're all trying to figure out during our lives, isn't it?
If I get better at programming (emphasis on if ) I'm going to pretty this up so it doesn't look like baby's first website (even though it is) but for now, here are some things to know about me:
First and foremost, I am an artist. That has been an undeniable fact about me since I shot out of the womb. I remember long car rides from my competative dancing days where, at the age of about 8, I'd pick up any scrap of paper and doodle on it. It was mostly angels and demons as I was raised Catholic, but some of the stuff I drew should've sent me to therapy lets be so real. But either way, I was drawing. When I was around 11 years old, that's when I really started taking art more seriously. I got my first real sketchbook from my grandma and filled it with sketches of minecraft YouTubers I watched at the time: Stampylongnose, DanTDM, Bodil40, Zexyzek, the list goes on. I can't describe it, but drawing just made me feel complete. It made me feel like I was doing something right with myself, even if it was just shitty pencil sketches formed by the hand of an untrained tween.
I started watching a lot of speedpaints after that. I wanted to learn and not only that, I wanted to improve . Incredibly art-dense fandoms like Minecraft, Undertale, Five Nights at Freddy's were my teachers, muses, and inspiration. And as the years passed, I got better. Some days I was very proud of my improvement. Some days I wanted to throw everything in the trash. But even when I was having art block strong enough to quit literally make me cry, even when I took months long breaks because I couldn't bear to look at my work, i always came back. There was something about it that I just could not ever fully run away from.
Unlike with art, I can't say that I've been a writer from day one. Not even close, actually. When I was in elementary school, I actually hated writing with a passion. I was crap at writing essays, I was dogshit at making what I wanted to say comprehensible, and whenever we had to write our stuff on paper, I couldn't even follow the margins correctly. I regularly underperformed to where I wanted to be (meaning C's and B-'s) and it was extremely discouraging. The ironic twist in this is that I read books like a monster. From the time I was in first grade, my bookshelves have always overflown with books. I wasn't allowed to watch TV during the week, so I needed some way of entertaining myself, and that was through escapism of the written word. I still remember one of my favorite books as a kid, I, Lorelei by Yeardly Smith. Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo. (That one taught me what 'melancholy' meant.) The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. All these stories that seemed to flow naturally from the pens of authors, and yet, I couldn't catch on to that melody.
The cause of this shift is quite funny, both at the time and in retrospect: Fanfiction. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw, because that's where it all started. Even worse, it was Voltron fanfic. VLD came out when I was in about 6th or 7th grade (11-13 years old). I remember when the seaons had staggering releases, and we'd have to wait for new content. I remember reading some fanfics and being satisfied with them, but there was more that I wanted, more that I couldn't find on ao3. I'd have to write it myself.
With time, I improved. I started writing more. I wrote Undertale fanfic and posted it to my (now deleted) DeviantArt. I wrote continuations of books that stopped at points before I was satisfied, The Outsiders, for example, and definitely a continuation of the series Because You'll Never Meet Me by Leah Thomas, because it was never fully finished. Or at the very least, the last book in the series wasn't ever published. (Leah, if you see this, please for the love fo G OD-) However, most of these early projects (rightly) never saw the light of day. Besides my early adventures on dA, the first peice of fanfiction I published for public consumption wasn't until October of 2020, a crack fic of The Magnus Archives posted on my ao3 account. It recieved little attention, as I'd hoped, but what it did receive was positive. I gained more confidence. In school, I was getting better at essay writing (I should hope so, I went to a private college prep school). In senior year, I was able to take AP English, and this further elevated my confidence that maybe I wasn't completely and utterly useless as a writer. Still, most of the peices that I'm proud of came from me writing on my own for fun.
My specialty was always continuations. I take the characters and bring them on a further journey of my own making. Or, I fill in blanks that had been left by previous writers. I did this next with Monster High. At the time, because it was the height of the pandemic, I was regressing. Badly. I was obssessed with childhood interests like Monster High, and I pumped out an almost 15,000 word story based on Frankie Stein's lineage, which at the time, was the longest thing I'd ever written. It received a bit more attention, all positive. I wanted to do more. I wanted more.
I kept writing, and with each new story, my goal was to make it even longer. A paragraph is too short? Add more detail. It doesn't make sense? Call it an artistic choice and move on. I got better, and my editing skills certainly did as well, and I began to feel even more confident and proud of my work. More than that, I felt like I could do something with it. I decided to major in creative writing. If I had more practical confidence in myself to major in art, I would have, but the reality of the world is that starving artists are starving for a reason (or at least, that was the lesson I gleaned growing up.) In picking colleges and thinking about future careers, the money aspect was what drove me to make the decisions I did. 'You can do more with writing than art,' I figured. We've yet to see if that was the right decision. Some days I regret not majoring in my biggest passion, some others I tell myself I made the correct choice, as the job market already is just crazy. Some days I think that because I had both of these talents that I've fostered for so long, I'll be alright either way. I guess only the future can really tell.