So here’s how this blog — this website — happened after I hadn’t written a thing in years.
This past August, I was on Twitter. I don’t know why; I had never really much used the site, though I’d given it a chance a few times. It just never really caught on with me. But this day I happened to on it and saw a meme asking why boys don’t wear crop tops like they did in the 1980s.
So I posted the following image of myself taken at the Mermaid Parade the previous June:
I thought that was it. Maybe get some likes, some laughs.
The next day, it had over 300 likes and multiple replies. Here’s the surprising bit: all of them were supportive.
That picture of me went viral for a few days, eventually coming to rest at, presently, 16.4k likes and 464 retweets (including quote retweets). Still, replies were almost universally supportive and body positive. It did a lot for my self-image.
It also got me a few new followers. A few of them I followed back. One of them turned out to be Alison Tyler, a (very prolific) author, and a part of Twitter’s Writer Community. This changed up the algorithm for me so that I started seeing her likes and follows. So other writers started popping up in my feed, and, guess what. Writers write some pretty funny and insightful things sometimes. So, without planning to, I found myself following a dozen of them, which spiraled into more dozens.
After a month of interacting with all of these clever (and, I won’t beat around the bush, overwhelmingly sexy) people, November was looming, bringing with it NaNoWriMo, and I caved. I started to think of an idea for NaNoWriMo, but then a friend reminded me of an idea I’d had (and actually written a few thousand words of, so it would have been a cheat for NaNoWriMo, and it quickly became clear I wasn’t going to make the December deadline). This was The Woman of Bones, the YA fantasy novel that I am now working on, along with occasional short fictions and musings like this.
That is, when not bouncing around the wry comments, frequent reality bombs, and occasional moments of publishing triumph, of a bunch of brilliant, crazy new friends and acquaintances on Twitter and Discord.
So, thanks Alison. This is all your fault. And everyone else: Please go read her wonderful writing, buy her books, patronize her. She’s worth it.
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