One year ago today, I became a fiction writer

One year ago today, I got my account at Teaspoon and began posting my first attempts at fiction. They were all fanfics--Doctor Who fanfics, obviously. The fanfics grew and grew, until they grew into each other and formed a novella about the Year that Wasn't at the end of season three. For the first time I could re-read a piece of fiction I'd written and not want to burn it immediately and forget I'd ever written it.

I posted my stories at my LJ as well. I acquired a reader who was so supportive in such an honest way that I began to think, maybe I could actually write fiction. Maybe it wasn't as out of the question for me as I'd always thought it was. Maybe--just maybe--

Not long after I finished "Valiant," or maybe I was still writing it, I came across the quotation from Neil Gaiman that is at the bottom of every page on this site:

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

It was in an essay he wrote about where he gets his ideas, a problem I'd always thought I'd had. What on earth would I write about? Reading that, I thought, daydreaming? I do that constantly. Those stories I tell myself when I'm on the treadmill or trying to drift off at night, the ones that I build on for days and days and sometimes years? THAT'S writing fiction?

Yes, it was. And that one thought was enough to break everything open inside me.

That's where the story of Emmae and Warin came from; I'd been telling myself variations on it for literally years. I wrote it down. I sent it around to some people. They liked it. I came up with another story, and another. I wondered, how do all of these stories fit together? Because in my head at least I am a very tidy person, and I like things that fit together. The thought of a young prince being tutored by an apparently immortal teacher came to me.

This, all this that you're looking at, was the result. And it all started a year ago today, with a fanfiction writer's account at Teaspoon.

Thank you deeply, eumenidis, that first reader who had faith in me. And thank you to every one of you who have had faith in me since.