It's been some time since I posted on my blog, but honestly, between writing the short stories and the ongoing serial and the sequel to The Kaedin Secret, I have been running myself a little ragged. Nonetheless, I will keep on. What other choice do I have?
When I first started writing, I was in primary school. I wasn't a good storyteller, but I had so many ideas crammed up in my head that I needed to let them out in the world before I exploded. They were probably good ideas, but as a kid, I didn't have the skills to tell them. I was terrible at pacing a narrative, at describing settings, at writing dialogue...
But I knew, even then, that telling stories was what I had to do.
I tried to tell stories through drawing, so I learned how to draw manga. I even took an exam and have a certificate from Japan for this! However, this route was not meant for me; I fucked up my right arm teaching - tendonitis, tennis elbow, frozen shoulder - and, at one point, even holding a writing instrument was impossible. I became miserable and depressed, partly because I felt like there was no avenue for me to escape my work.
I loved to draw. I could spend hours and days on a single piece.
But because of my work as a teacher, I could not hold a pencil. I could not hold a stylus. I love to draw and that love was taken from me.
Yet, even when the fingers of my right hand could not straighten, even when my wrist was swollen with cysts, I never stopped writing. I used my left hand and my right thumb and index finger to type out my stories. I continued with fanfiction, and then with original stories. I fleshed out characters that had been but whispers of ghosts when I was younger, and somehow, despite the depression and the physical pain, I hammered out the very first draft of The Kaedin Secret that I invited one of my fanfic reviewers to read, to see if there was any merit in it.
She loved it.
With her encouragement, I had The Kaedin Secret sent to a local editor to help me polish it up and made the story more muscular and cohesive. I decided to self-publish, just because I wanted to know if I could do it (I am pretty terrible at self-publishing, it turns out, but that's a story for another day), and despite all the pain and the worry and the fact that The Kaedin Secret isn't popular in any sense of the word, I love that I loved my story so much that I wrote it through all of my pain.
I may not be the best storyteller ever, but by every idea I have ever had and every idea I will ever have, I am going to be a stubborn one.