#churning out content to please the algo and metrics and ao3 machine

[ohmeadows]

When did you discover your love for writing?

this ended up being a bit of a story, so. sorry for length.

must have been around 2001? i went to a really underfunded school in a broke town and we didn't have anything to do after school ended, so i mostly went to my grandma's and read books she bought me. one day i came home and she'd bought the lotr trilogy, and it was a very difficult translation. it took me months of careful reading on her couch. then i finished it and it felt like my life transformed. i watched the movies as they released in the cinema, i didn't have any friends to hang out with on the weekend so i'd beg my mom to drive me to the nearest big town and let me watch fellowship of the ring again. i couldn't get enough, so i started visiting fansites for it and thus discovered fanfiction. my english wasn't great, but i couldn't stop thinking about writing something for myself. yes, mary sue/self-insert, whatever. yes, it was with legolas and aragorn and all of those.

my fanfics were, obviously, not good. but i had a good time making them. i connected with a community of writers who had a ton of advice to give out, who suggested books to read, movies to check out. while i'm not in touch with any of them anymore, i know some of them went on to become university professors and literary translators, and that's pretty cool. i honestly remember less of the writing as much as i remember the community i kept having on livejournal. on top of that, writing a journal almost daily was really good consistent writing exercise. i loved writing so much that it became The Hobby for me, and i kept the lj and a physical journal going at once.