I've tried to maintain a blog so many times before but ultimately I find everything I write embarrassing and I end up deleting it.
This might be deleted too.
As someone who wants to be a writer, I've decided to look at where it all began.
It took off for me when I was 11 and a half and I discovered fan fiction.
Now many of you might regard fan fiction lame; a wasteful space full of unoriginal characters doing ridiculous things.
And while writing fan fiction doesn't work for me anymore (I genuinely do feel like I'm wasting my time now), in the seventh grade it was where I discovered I could write.
My sixty-chapter Harry Potter fan fiction, well, novel, was written Pre-Deathly Hallows release and focused on the adventures of the Marauders and Lily and some friends for Lily that I invented that paired perfectly with Sirius and Remus. Stupid Peter never had a girlfriend.
Yes, I didn't do much of my own world-building by borrowing from J K Rowling but I did exercise a certain amount of creativity and more importantly I was putting my work out there for feedback.
I never had confidence enough to show my writing to any of my friends (maybe because I knew instinctively that fan fiction was not cool) but I had no issue posting my stuff for strangers to read behind the safety of an unguessable username (so unguessable in fact that I no longer remember what it was).
So if you're a kid with nothing to do this summer vacation, write some fan fiction. You can always change the names and have an original story to sell like E. L James did.
If you're an adult, you can try it too! Even if I feel a bit silly doing it now, a large amount of fan fiction is written by adults.
You might even, like me, discover how sex works by reading some of the more colorful stories.
