Though I began my journey in publishing two years ago, at the height of the pandemic, my journey as a writer began a much longer time ago.
When I was in first grade, I wrote a two page story about a white cat who couldn’t live in her hometown because everyone in that town was allergic to her. My teacher was astonished that a child came up with something like that. She didn’t know that my mom was deathly allergic to cats, while I was fascinated with them. I moved states that year, and stopped writing for a while as I adjusted to my new routine.
When I was fourteen, I started my first novel: a hybrid of fantasy and anime tropes that was meant to be the start of a trilogy. I began posting it one chapter at a time on a tiny blogging website, waiting for people to hail it as the next big thing! The best story they’ve ever read!
It was not. It was terrible, and the wonderful people of the internet told me so. I was embarrassed, but not discouraged. I kept writing.
When I was sixteen, I began writing the novel that would eventually become my debut novel. It was based on a dream I had about a red-haired girl, a werewolf, and a grey room. The novel grew and developed as I did, with the protagonist going from sixteen years old to twenty years old. I added elements of Fae mythology, creating a story that was a weird mix of styles and tropes. I finished the first draft when I was twenty, and I began writing the second book.
When I was twenty four, I was finally comfortable enough with the book to begin querying agents, so I did. About twenty rejections later, I gave up. The story was too old, or too similar to other stories on the market, or simply not what they were looking for. I began polishing the first novel again, making revisions, adding characters, and changing others. The love interest, originally a boy named Tristan, became a woman named Talia, and from there: a spark.
When I was twenty seven, I realized that I didn’t want to be traditionally published after all. So, I self-published, and my book flopped. Hard. To be fair, it was unpolished, and the “final” product was a result of the week I was in quarantine because a single student in a class on a different floor than mine was diagnosed with COVID-19. Funny, how our standards for that have changed now. Now, I can have a student in my class who tests positive, and life continues as normal. But, I digress.
Two years later, I released the second book, and re-released a more polished version of the first book, and now we’re here! I’m midway through obtaining my MFA in Creative Writing, four years into an ESL teaching career in South Korea, and almost a month into a marriage to my favorite person in the world. I don’t think fourteen year old me ever saw this coming. They would honestly probably just be surprised I made it this long. But, I did, fourteen year old me. We did. And we have so many more stories to tell.
Avery Carter 