Just Keep Writing....

Sept 17th, 2015

If there's one thing I learned over the past year, it's just keep writing.

A year ago today, an entire role-play was created all because us How to Train Your Dragon fans, on tumblr,  were all making jokes about Stoick the Vast and purposely trying to ground ourselves into a dungeon. This spontaneous chaos eventually became known as "Battle of the Grounded Dungeon."

In the early days of all this, I would merely observe- not being sure whether to jump in or not. Ten days later, my first character was created on the fly. She was quite a bit confused at first as to why she was there. Svie∂ was pretty much a supporting character out of all the big main ones in the role-play, but at the time that was all I really felt I had time for.

She would be integral in healing other characters. Sometimes that felt like the only thing she did- turns out she'd become my most introverted character yet.

Eventually I came up with more of this family, her sister and their uncle. Their backstory was slowly forming in my mind. I brought in the new characters just in time for some major BOTGD events.

Winter in reality was tough, dreary and cold. To be honest, all this dreariness starts to get to me by late January. So late March when New Jersey was still getting cold temperatures, came one bad weekend where I was just too tired out and too stressed over events, both fictional and real. That day was just a bad combination of being forced to socialize in real life beyond what I was mentally prepared to do, and trying to hang out with my role-play friends after that. Bad choice on my part because I didn't do any roleplaying that night, and ended up with a panic attack.

The days after, I managed to write fill in oneshots for my characters. If there was one thing that was going to help me get past the irrational panic attack, it's writing.

Three weeks later, in a much better mental state, one of my characters and I made a split second decision which was a major event for me and my role-play friends. Drama is fun to write for me, and this was the biggest event yet to ever happen to my characters.

Eventually we closed out the whole main story with a final thread and we were free to write extended universe and beyond. Not that there was anything holding me back from writing backstory beforehand, but now I had more time.

As time went on, I soon found myself writing events that were far into my character's past, as much as 90 years prior to the events of the role-play. That, from the very start, was my very own just because it takes place so long before the BOTGD events.

A few months ago, I found myself world building. Now all these various towns, cities, and landmarks were coming to life before my eyes.

About a month ago, I made the decision to make writing my career. If I hadn't joined in on this role-play, I just don't know what I'd be doing now. The Battle of the Grounded Dungeon has lead me back to original fiction writing and world building and I have my friends and their influence on me to thank for that.


"Eventually all the pieces fall into place, until then, laugh at the confusion, live for the moment, and know that everything happens for a reason." Anonymous