A friend recently asked me what writing has done for me. I was momentarily at a loss on how to answer because it’s done many things for me. Back 7 years ago when I jumped on the crazy fan-fiction train. I spent much of my time reading fan-fiction, high fantasy, and romance novels with a little bit of sci-fi mixed in. But I was writing boring tech papers for class. So for this post, I guess I need to bullet point the main points.

• Story writing gave me permission to be creative.
• Writing gave me an outlet for negative and positive feelings.
• Writing lets me stretch my boundaries and allows me to explore different mindsets (putting yourself into a character’s mind can push you out of your box).
• I can write about traumatic things in my life without fear of repercussions (because it’s passed off as fiction).
• I find writing the hard things to be therapeutic.

That, in a nutshell, is what writing has done for me. Before I was a writer, I used to write music, but that was harder with a houseful, and I always felt as though I was bothering someone (when you live in a loft house, you hear everything). I ended up not writing anything for a long time. The best thing GarnetSeren ever did for me was blackmailing me into writing that first horrid chapter.