Let’s see if I can finish off my bio. here; that does mean I may add to this down the road, but it won’t be as another post, just more details to this one.

Entering college, I grasped that if I wanted to ever get a novel written, I’d have to form a writing habit. So I searched around on the internet for ideas and writing contests that might help me get a book written. My searching seemed pretty fruitless after a long while until I discovered National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month. True, most adult books are longer than that, but 50,000 words are a lot more than I had ever written.

I could not wait for November to arrive. I even began writing in advance on my novel because I didn’t want to wait. Remember, at this time I still used pens and pencils to write with.

Eventually November did arrive, and I did well for the first week. The second week did slow me down, but I soon got a second wind and found myself writing every moment that I could (even if I didn’t have time to write a full sentence). By the end of the month I knew I’d come up short of the goal, but I realized that only a few more days would take me to 50,000 words, and even at that, I had written much more of a novel in one month than I had written in my whole life (and I had a different story that had grown fairly long by then).

My writing career had finally taken off, I knew. And then June came around. You see, I had turned in papers to serve a mission for the church I belong to. I got called to serve in Costa Rica for two years, and by the time  I got back, I no longer desired to write or even to read much.

That threw me into a hiatus for quite some time. I tried participating in NaNoWriMo 2008, but I bombed that (I plan to write a post on why and how to avoid the mistakes I made that year). By then, I figured my writing days had come to an end except where the news was concerned. But guess what? I got sick the following October, which left me bedridden for quite a long time. Guess what I did? I read and wrote (NaNoWriMo 2009). I even succeeded in the goal of 50,000 words that year! Perhaps my writing career could take off after all, I decided.

During January 2010 I discovered LTUE (Life, the Universe, and Everything), a writing symposium that takes place at Brigham Young University (I had switched colleges – before the mission I attended Kansas State University). 2011 saw me rededicated to writing but suffering a large writing slump once more after the first few months. But my reading began to pick up in turn.

I participated in NaNoWriMo 2010, proved more successful than the year prior and decided I was once more a full-fledged writer (a really great feeling that I hadn’t felt since 2006). I attended LTUE and realized the importance of attending such conferences not for the learning so much as for the connections. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not dissing symposiums and writing conferences at all. I had just completed my first novel and knew the next steps from there.

It took me longer than I had intended to begin rewriting that novel. Part of the problem is that authors talk all the time about writing, but they never seem to talk about the rewriting process – just that no first draft is perfect. So I had to figure out how to rewrite on my own. Mid-march found me with a completed second draft much shorter than the first.

And that brings me about a month into having this blog, so that’s where my history stops for now. I may add to it from other posts when I first get an agent or a publisher, but otherwise, you do not have to worry about the history of an alcoholic…I mean…writer posts popping up again.