Ok so "Hi!" might not be the catchy title the website creator suggests adding but it gets the point of the post across. Hi. I am Hannah.
If you are to be sticking around and reading more posts on this here website you are likely going to want to know more about me (thus the Hi!).
So you know my name already. If you've read the about page, you know I started writing when I was twelve. What more can I tell you?
I am a New Zealander (you likely didn't know that). I live in the US now and have for 10 years but I was originally born in New Zealand and true to my roots I will always call myself a Kiwi (like the bird, not the fruit, look it up if you've never seen one).
More about me: I am part of a six-person family. I have heard of much larger families but to me, six is plenty large enough. I have two sisters, one 16 and one 12, and a brother age 14. I am also lucky enough to have two dogs, a Shih Tzu/Spaniel mix named Twixie and a German Shepherd/Husky mix named Izzy. I'm very proud to be able to say I've trained both of them to high five (basically shake but I prefer to call it high five, it's way cooler).
EDIT: I now also own my own dog. A mini golden doodle named Asha who also knows how to high five. And rollover. And play dead. And dance with you. She is very cute.
As I said before, I started writing at twelve when my mother told me I really had the talent for it. But before I got to where I am now (not by any means a published novelist or anything! at least not yet) I had to go through a whole lot of mess-ups and restarts and a journey of desperately trying to figure out how to write and what I wanted to write and how to stick to one thing for more than a few seconds (who knew that could be so hard).
As a twelve-year-old trying to write, I wrote a lot of beginnings of stories and not a lot of ends. I got about two or three chapters into the books generally before quitting and deciding they weren't quite right. That season lasted at least a couple of years.
Then came the season in which I thought (for some crazy reason) I might actually be able to write and publish the next installment of Percy Jackson. In fairness, I was only 14 or so but I truly believed if only I could finish the book I would be able to publish it and all my dreams would come true.
Not so much. I discovered later on reading on Rick Riordan's site that I could not in fact publish the next installment of Percy Jackson. While I was a little bummed, I was proud of myself as well. Why? Because I had finally completed my first actual novel. Sure I couldn't publish it but I had actually managed to push myself to write 50 or so thousand words of the same novel. The book inspired me, told me that perhaps this dream of mine (the dream to publish a book in case you hadn't figured that out yet) could someday become a reality.
That's when I started on the next book.
Ok, so I didn't actually start it right then. It was a couple more years until I actually started it. Or at least a year or so as I spent time planning and planning and planning the book series. (the planning did start pretty much right then)
But I got the idea for the book. Or the series. I can't quite remember actually how I got the idea. Probably some Pinterest writing prompt or such. The fact that I can't remember what it was tells me I've twisted it enough that I won't get anyone complaining about copyright which is good.
The point is, I got an idea, and I loved it. I didn't start writing right away. I kind of let it sit and marinate for a bit. I brainstormed and drew maps and family trees and timelines and figured out how I wanted it to go before I even started on the first book.
The first book was a failure actually. I wrote so slowly for a while, completed it through NaNoWriMo, and then realized, oh crap this is such a mess I can't even fix it with all the editing in the world.
But that's ok. Because in scrapping that first book I ended up with what I've got now and what I've got now is pretty cool. What I've got now is a 92,000-word novel, the first in a series of fairytale twists entitled Once Upon a Tome. What I've got now is The Criminal.
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