I was fourteen when I attempted to write my first novel. Half finished, riddled with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and printed in pink ink, I gave it to my English teacher and asked her for feedback. A month later she handed it back to me and told me it was "good" without having read it.
How did I know she hadn't read it? The story was about an assassin for hire who disposed of her "kills" in her bathtub by dissolving their remains in sulphuric acid. I'm pretty sure if she had read it one heck of a letter would have been sent home.
With the lack of constructive criticism from my English teacher, I placed my novel writing on hold. I dallied mainly with typical teenage, angst-ridden poetry until several years later, on a romantic whim, I turned a boy I knew into a superhero, literarily (not literally) speaking. Because I'm super awesome, I included some of his friends and chronicled their superhero adventures as a birthday present to him.
My relationship with the superhero version of the boy lasted the completion of a dozen short stories. My relationship with the real life boy didn't. And I was writing pretty dang quick too!
There were a couple more plot twists but since they don't involve radioactive spiders, magical wardrobes or handsome Tolkien-esque elves they're not really worth talking about! So that's pretty much the yellow brick road to how I got here.
