God I used to hate reading. When I was six I don’t even think an offer of twenty dollars would have swayed me. Ask me to read for half an hour and I’d read random sentences in between thoughts about what was for dinner. Ask me to read ten pages and I’d probably whine about it for the amount of time it would have taken me to read the whole thing if I’d actually just gotten started. And yet here I am, about to start writing my first book.
Sitting in my chair, staring at the blank document in front of me, I think back to what it was that first made me fall in love with words. They were poetic. Lyrical. It was a love story, and it had werewolves in it. But it took me further than the pages. I was at the age where life became more complicated and the book let me escape it. It’s as if the words somehow found there way into my bloodstream and became as vital as the blood that keeps my heart beating, transferring me into their world with each beating letter. The book was called Shiver.
Now I know I sound very dramatic with the whole heartbeat analogy and all, but I used to tell people I’d write with my toes if I had to. Reading and writing became therapeutic in a way I could hardly even comprehend at the age of thirteen. I wanted to write a book like Shiver for the other people like me out there to read. I wanted to write a book to take them out of the tangled mess of thoughts in their head. I wanted to write a book to make them realize the beauty of words and the power they (the words and themselves) have.
I wanted to write a book.
But sitting in my chair, now almost twenty and staring at the blank document in front of me, I’m nervous. And now the words are like blood clots.
Sincerely, a bookworm. 