An Introduction

I've decided to chronicle my adventures (to use a lame term) in writing the book I hope to one day have actually-for-real-hopefully published. The story in question is called Seafear, and I'm rather reluctant to talk more about it now, because it's so new.

A bit of an introduction to me: I am Ryan Smith, and I will be 19 in precisely five days. I'm a freshman at Michigan State University, studying political science at James Madison Residential College. I have been a storyteller since I was two years old; my mother likes to tell me about the time I went into her room in the middle of the night, because I couldn't sleep, and told her a story that lasted for fifteen minutes. For a two-year-old, that's rather impressive. Around the time I was six I discovered that people actually wrote down their stories, so I started doing that. It wasn't anything, impressive, but it was writing.

When I was nine, I decided that I was going to write a really long epic fantasy, seven books in all, and I sat down and plotted the whole thing out. What the hell kind of nine year old does that? I went all out on this stupid story, going on about some magical continent and the seven countries that were always at war on it. I had a pretty solid roster of characters, and I was kind of nerdy about everything. I still have lists and lists of character genealogies and alphabets and races and religions and... well, suffice to say, I got pretty heavily involved with this dumb story. (I makes it sound like I was taking heroin or something.)

Well, I abandoned that story around the time I was 15 because I realized it sucked and that I had a better idea. I didn't get so heavily involved this time, but I did end up actually finishing the book in around eight months, which was good for me, because I'm a very, very slow writer. I intended to get it published, but then I decided that it wasn't the absolute best I could do. Actually, last week I rediscovered fictionpress.com and decided to stick my book up there; for the curious, here's the URL: http://www.fictionpress.com/s/2565537/1/The_Apprentice_Wizard

It was around sometime a month ago that I got my idea for Seafear. Well, according to the file data function on MS Word, it was at exactly 8:39 PM on August 2nd. So yes, a little more than a month ago. I normally like to spend my time plotting obsessively; I worked out the plot for The Apprentice Wizard and its four sequels for a year before I even began writing. Here, the story sort of landed in my head fully-formed. (Well, it felt more like someone had launched it at my face from a slingshot.) I tinkered around with it for a while, and then, my first free day at college, I wrote the prologue.

And then the next free day I wrote Chapter One.

And then over the course of yesterday evening and this afternoon, I finished Chapter Two.

This is a weird pace for me. I'm only 8000 words in, but I'm a phenomenally slow writer. With TAW I wrote the first 50,000 words over the course of roughly two months, and then it took me an additional five months to eke out 30,000 more words. But this thing is going by so quickly, I wouldn't be surprised if I had it finished by January (maybe getting it done over Christmas break).

So yeah. I don't know who will be reading this, but here it is. I'm writing a book, and writing about writing a book. Enjoy my travails.