Hobbies Part 2

Yesterday I posted about my love and history of drawing. Tonight you will be told about my love of writing (whether you want to or not). ;)

As a kid I was always coming up with fantasy stories. I loved mythological creatures and when my sisters, friends and I played (whether with Barbies, toy horses, or without toys at all) I was always coming up with fantastical plots to act out. Once the Disney movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire came out, my sister and I were obsessed and always incorporated some sort of element from the movie into our games.

Despite how much I liked stories and making them up, I didn't really enjoy writing until around fourth grade; I blame this on tedious school assignments given in kindergarten and second grade. I remember one particular assignment in second grade where we had to copy an article about Abraham Lincoln and do it in our best handwriting. That didn't do much of anything to help my love of writing.

I don't remember when exactly I suddenly liked to write stories, but I remember doing a short story for a contest in fourth grade and really enjoying it. After that I think I slowly grew to love writing and did it more often, along with drawing.

In sixth or seventh grade I discovered www.nanowrimo.org, or National Novel Writing Month. Granted I didn't get any of my stories very far up off the ground until ninth grade when I began to take NaNoWriMo more seriously. I knew all of my stories would be novels; there was too much in my head for them not to be. In eighth grade I actually read the story I was most actively working on to my English class (which was awesome, by the way).

After almost a full semester of  ninth grade, my parents and I decided that it would be best for me to be home schooled. This gave me more time to work on my stories and drawings. At that point I was able to work on NaNoWriMo a lot more and was actually able to get close to halfway through, which was a big leap from the previous few years.

Eighth and ninth grade were the peak for my writing travels. After ninth grade the amount of time spent on writing decreased as I focused more on developing my drawing skills. As the years progressed to the present, the time spent on writing continuously dropped until I wasn't writing at all. I think most of this was due to my focus on drawing, plus the writing block I was suffering from almost constantly.

Last year my friend and I did a story for NaNoWriMo together and we won, which was very exciting and fun. :) She has her own blog, you should check it out: http://firefliesandbowties.blogspot.com/

As of now, I haven't been writing at all for quite some time. I tried to start a short story, but I wasn't really into it and sort of gave up on it. For quite a while now I've been meaning to get back into writing and working on my stories. It's just a matter of time and interest, I suppose.

Anyway, this is part two about my hobbies. Part three to come. Hope I'm not boring you.