Last month, YA fantasy author Amie Irene Winters shared her Throwback Thursday of her very young writer self. This week, I’m joining her! If you’ve got a writing throwback, post it with this hashtag so we can all read your story.

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In eighth grade, I had a class in which we got to write our own short story, type it up, print it, paste it inside a blank book, and voila – a book was born. I thought this was the coolest thing in the world, and I really hope teachers still do this or something similar. It gave me a sense of accomplishment in my early writing days.

Just look at that cover design. Cutting edge! You’ll also notice that I went by C.L. Stratos because R.L. Stine was a huge influence in my young reading life.

The publishing company is “Sotarts Inc.”. That’s my last name backwards. Clever, clever.

I have to say that formatting was much easier in the “print, cut, and paste” method…
It’s fun to go through this book and think of how exciting it was and how hard I worked on it. It’s a total of eight pages long, but at the time, it seemed like something huge. Like a novel.
Then I came across my bio at the back and noticed this line:

Wow. I’ve always written, ever since forever, and I loved it, but I didn’t remember that I’d thought of writing fiction as a career as early as eighth grade. I remember wishing I could do that in my junior year of high school specifically, when I had two novels written and really wanted to submit the second one to an agent. I couldn’t edit it well enough and didn’t understand what was missing or why I had so much trouble. What was wrong with the writing style? Something was off. But never mind about that. I’m going to do a separate post on my plans to honor the book I once thought could make me a published writer.

And this is what I was like. Not quite a serious-looking writer at that point! But certainly fun. 🙂
Big thanks to Amie Winters for her wonderful idea to invent #tbtwriter! I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed writing this post!