First Post...

There's something I've learned during my four years as a Creative Writing major...

It's a LOT harder to write a novel I'm proud of than I thought when I was a kid.

That being said, I've decided to create this blog. I guess I figure I'll have more motivation to write if my novel is even MORE on my mind than it normally is. And the self-publicity can't hurt either.

Allow me to stop being awkward for the time being and briefly (translated: less than a million paragraphs) introduce myself. I'm Erin Millar (clearly), senior Creative Writing major (Org Comm minor) at Ohio Northern University, set to graduate in May. I've been writing stories since first grade...and have been in love with it for that long as well. My first story, or the first story that I remember writing AND still have the copy of, was some original Frog and Toad story I wrote for my reading group. It was an assignment--we all wrote a short story, our teacher bound them together, and they we illustrated the books. I still have that book. My story was about six sentences long.

I've written many stories since that first one in first grade. Several were short stories...a good handfull were my version of "novels" (read: chapter books where each of the chapters was about a page and a half long...handwritten)...a majority of those "novels" never got finished.

Fast forward to two years ago. I'm bored, sitting in a class I should probably be paying attention in. Brittany, my sorority twin, is sitting behind me and, frankly, never pays attention and does her own homework or her own writing about 90% of the time we're in that class. Philosophy is dreadfully boring to me, so my solution to keep myself awake is to start writing something I find interesting. So I start scribbling some obscure opening to some story that I have no plan for into a spare notebook. This story gets me through that class (with a B, but that's so not the point). During that quarter I created my characters, the details...I think I even did the outline--which I never do for anything.

Two years later, I'm still working on that novel. I'm still hooked. It's going slow and not always steady, but that story is always in the back of my mind. And after two full quarters of working on it so intensely (for senior capstone) that I got a little sick of it, I'm turning back to it again. I'm determined to write this story. I like it too much.

It's currently titled "Nor the Battle to the Strong" (up for some debate, but not much). I'm not going to bore you with the details, and I especially don't want to spoil anything in the case that it finally gets published, but it's about two sisters, from a family of seven kids, who join a cult and how it not only effects them and their family when it actually happens, but how it continues to effect them fifteen years later.

Anyway, that's what I plan to talk about in this blog--writing this novel and hopefully my writing experiences in general as well. I hope you continue reading and if there's anything in particular you want me to talk about, mention it in the comments and I'll try to get to it. :)

See you next post!