I've Always Been a Writer

For my first blog, I suppose I should do an introduction.

Hi! I’m Ash, I’m agender, and use they/them pronouns, though maybe someday I’ll use different ones. This blog is going to be a big mishmash of things that I want to say, but don’t necessarily want to ball up into a tweet or ten.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. Telling stories has always been in my blood and bones, from playing pretend with friends in my back yard, to getting carried away on writing assignments in school, I’ve always loved sharing stories.

When you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, you get a lot of astronauts and firefighters, race car drivers and doctors. I wanted to be a lot of things: a veterinarian, a scientist (I was not specific), an astronomer (I narrowed it down), an artist. But what I always was, without question, was a writer. It wasn’t until I was about thirteen that I realized the people who wrote the amazing books I inhaled faster than any teacher or librarian could recommend them were actually PAID to WRITE! It was a career! Needless to say, I was stunned, and had a new goal.

A lot of writers will know a version of the next part: I wrote a lot of really bad stories, books, discovered NaNoWriMo when I was fifteen, wrote in cafes, during class, wrote a book for an independent study my junior year that I can’t even remember the plot of now. At the encouragement of teachers and my family, I applied for college, to major in English.

College was hard at first. I almost dropped out. Writing went to the back burner if it wasn’t for school. I felt like I wasn’t good enough, didn’t have enough to say to write books like the ones I loved so much. Roleplaying and writing fic were where I escaped, and then I fell in love with Linguistics. Every single class I took was eye opening. Where the lit and writing classes felt stale, the linguistics classes were fun, new ways to see words and understand language! It just made sense to use this love of language not to write my own books, but to help others tell their stories. I researched becoming a book editor.

One problem: I was in Oregon, where I’d grown up and gone to college, and I wanted to move to Seattle, stay in the Pacific Northwest I loved. I didn’t want to go live in New York City, which I thought was a requirement. It was too big of a risk, and I didn’t know a single person who lived there. I got up to the edge of a tall diving board, applied to a few internships, and, when I didn’t hear back, shamefully moved away from that edge, too afraid to make the jump, and climbed down the ladder.

I met amazing people—including my spouse—through the fandom spaces that I channeled all my creative energy into through college. I cosplayed, I explored and came to terms with my queerness, moved to Seattle, and took the jobs I could get: customer service. I make a mean latte, but Seattle is an expensive city. So we, my spouse and I, decided to move back to his home in North Carolina. He was the only person I knew but I’m good at making casual friends. I got more customer service jobs.

Something was missing... so I got back into NaNoWriMo. I got back into writing. It felt right, especially after learning who I was: queer, nonbinary.

I wrote a couple books for my spouse, with characters and worlds we created together. I wrote fanfiction, which developed my voice and skills. Then I wrote one that was for me, back in high school, when things were confusing, when I wasn’t sure who I was or where I wanted to go in life. I wrote the book I wished I’d had. Queer, nonbinary, trans, and magical.

Hopefully, that’s the book I’ll get to share with teens (and everyone else). It’s the book that connected me to my amazing agent, and, if I’m very lucky, the book that will prove thirteen year old Ash right: I was meant to be a writer.