Story Chronicles

So far I've kept my promise to myself, and I'll be trying to update this every day. Today's topics for discussion: my story, my website, and young authors in general. Let's get this started:

For anyone who doesn't know already, I love writing, and as of this moment I'm working on a story that I'm calling Fantasy at Heart. It's, obviously, a fantasy story, and it takes place about a thousand years in the future, in the ruins of the city once known as Shanghai...the people who live there now are different, changed. Everything that makes us human was disappeared, and the survivors are barely more than animals. All the parts of us that we love have been forgotten.

But what if someone begins to remember?

That's all I'm going to say for now, because I'm paranoid, especially on the internet. Right now it's more than 91,000 words and counting, and I hope to finish it for November so I can write the sequel for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. If you want to learn more about me and my story, you can visit my website, which is listed in the link bit to the right. It's all about me and my travels around the world as a young writer.

Ah, young writers. It seems like a lot of them are popping up lately, from Caryn Kluver to Nancy Yi Fan to the infamous Gloria Tesch, and some are better than others. This has raised a question for me: why? Why do we young writers feel this innate need to get published as soon as we possibly can, no matter how good or bad or stories may be, how mature our prose is? I want to get published because I love writing and I know that I'm going to be writer, no matter what. If I get published now or in ten years....well, I know I'm going to be published. But it seems that ever since Christopher Paolini's parents self-published his book and it was subsequently picked up by Knopf, it's become the "in" thing to be a teen writer. Personally, I think most of us should wait. Teenage skills are constantly being improved (in most cases) and that if you get published now, you're going to look back in a year and see how bad your writing was in comparison to the present. So I think most kids should wait.

There are, however, some exceptions. There are some teens who are truly gifted and write stories beyond their years. Words are their plaything, and they bend them and use them in new ways, ways that have never been seen before. They're rare, but I've seen them. And they should go for it.

The question is, are you one of them?

That's all for now. Next topic: Books I love and books I hate.