Eeeee! I’m getting ANTHOLOGIZED!

I started writing a LONG time ago, but I started publishing about five years, during my first few months at Southern New Hampshire University. One of the first poems I ever published, a sonnet called “Ode to Apollo” is now included in this groovy anthology.

It is so flattering that people wanted to include my little poem, and it is so amazing to realize how far I’ve come. I wrote that poem for writing club my sophomore year of high school. It was the best I’d ever been paid for my writing, too, when I sold it.

If anyone wants “to be a writer” (especially if you have a hard time finishing/polishing novels) GO WRITE AND PUBLISH POETRY/SHORT STORIES. It is so much easier than getting a book deal and its basically the writing equivalent of an internship. Go learn the ropes. You’ll love it.

When I tell people I’ve been writing for eight years, what most people don’t realize is that means I’ve been perfecting my tetris game for almost a decade.

Character Introduction: Mr. Starkey

So my life is still being eaten alive by NaNoWriMo...so I thought I’d leave a little piece of what I’m working on, from The Neverland Wars:

Gwen After lunch, Gwen trudged to fifth period biology, and then hurried across campus for her final and favorite class. She liked Mr. Starkey’s classroom. Her speech and debate teacher had turned the boxy room into a place that he felt comfortable in, and it showed. The walls were plastered with posters and quotations of great speakers, all of whom had lived and breathed the inspirational spirit of the sixties. John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. hung beside Bob Dylan and John Lennon. When Mr. Starkey sat at his desk, he typed by the glow of an antique stained-glass lamp, the origins of which had never been explained.

Mr. Starkey tended to dress in a manner that made him look like a much older university professor, or a much younger actor from New York. He seemed to be under the delusion that he was teaching a college course, not a high school elective, but the students never minded the slight pretensions that accompanied this. Mr. Starkey acted like a college professor and treated his students like adults, something which won him instant favor with all of his classes. Gwen certainly appreciated it, and was fond of the way he always smelled like old books.

Found this in my high school notebook. I can't believe that as soon as I finish this paper, I'll have a Bachelors of the Arts in English Language and Literature.

Just got back from the funeral. Rest well, Sarah. You had a distinctive face and a distinctive heart. I wish you could have been with us so much longer.