October 5, 2024

I think the first story I’ve ever written was a Harry Potter fanfiction or Inuyasha fanfiction when I was twelve.

Maybe the Inuyasha fanfiction came first.

I was first introduced to Harry Potter in 7th grade. It was required reading, and I became obsessed. This was early internet days, but I stalked the official Harry Potter website forums, and doing so introduced me to the world of roleplaying.

Whether it was Harry Potter roleplaying, Dragonball Z roleplaying, or Inuyasha roleplaying, I never roleplayed as an established character. I loved to create my own characters and insert them into the story. My writing journey began as roleplaying.

In high school, sometime between sophomore and senior year, I was a member of an online anime roleplaying group. I was less into roleplaying and more into writing self-insert, of a sort, characters into the mixed anime fanfiction. That means I would write my, and my group members, online personas/avatars as characters in a world that also contained characters from different anime. I never finished the story I started writing.

I still have that story.

20 years later.

Right after I graduated high school, I became an avid fan of twdramas, jdramas, and kdramas. I was a crazy fangirl for certain generation 1 and 2 kpop groups. I no longer wrote anime inspired fanfiction, but kpop inspired fanfiction.

Except, my plots were not what you’d typically read in fanfiction.

Assassins and murder.

Heavy fantasy worlds with complex magic systems.

Melodramas.

Superheroes and villains.

I realized I limited myself by using kpop stars, anime, or already established IP characters. I could do so much more by creating all the characters.

And honestly, that was the best realization ever.

I always say I don’t create my characters. They come to speak to me in my dreams or when I’m daydreaming. They tell me who they are, how they connect to each other or a plot, and I listen. Not everyone had a story interesting enough, so engaging that I feel compelled to write it. To constantly think about it. But many do, and I end up hearing their voices in my head for years.

So I stopped with the fanfictions and switched to all original stories with original characters.

Laney and Hayden were one of the first original couples I wrote and posted online. I never finished that story after my hard drive corrupted and I lost some unpublished chapters.