I knew I wanted to write ever since I picked up a pencil. In first grade, I wrote my first story, which surprisingly, despite the misspelled words and slanted sentences across the page, actually had a plot. In second grade, my teacher had us sit in a circle on this big red carpet, and she handed me one of the stories I wrote for the writing section of our class. I looked around, confused, because no one else received their story back. She asked me to read mine in front of the class, and after, my classmates all shrieked with joy, asking me to read it again. Mrs. Purtill's praise kept me going. Throughout my Elementary School years, I continued writing, using the only people I knew as characters. It was then that I started to create this world in my head and had the realization that words are simply a second side of life. With words, I could create another world to escape my own, and at such a young age as 9, I did. My cousins and I went on all of these adventures running from witches and saving each other from the downfalls of life-and as I'm thinking about it now, it's like I was creating all of these stories to make up for my seamlessly boring reality. During middle school and the first two years of high school, I was constantly knocked down. I felt like my writing was insufficient and my teachers never seemed to really admire my work. I watched as these other students breezed through school with straight A's and perfect essays and I just shied away from it all. My junior year, something spectacular happened. All of a sudden, I was confident. I walked into my first day of creative writing and wrote a poem that left me speechless. My teacher told me I should enter it into a contest, which I did, and won. I recited poems for assignments without a bat of an eye, and journals began to stack up in my room. Poem after poem, lyrics and short stories-I was unstoppable. I took enough English credits between Junior and Senior year that I probably would've been eligible to graduate early. British Literature, Film, Speech, and Creative Writing all shaped my last two years of high school. That is, until I took journalism. Journalism was something I never considered. I always knew I wanted to be an author, but I realized that I couldn't just be an author-at least not anytime soon. So, journalism seemed like the perfect fit. I was still writing, and that's all that really mattered. After being accepted to my school that I solely picked for the writing program, I started at The University of Rhode Island. Now, as a soon-to-be junior, I couldn't be happier in the world of writing. It's my passion, and it's something that keeps me going everyday. So what better way to write than to share it with everyone? I've decided to start this blog so I can share all of these random thoughts with you, and mostly because, why the hell not? I've heard that I wasn't good enough to make it in this industry more times than I could count, but here I am, a journalism major and english minor, with a 3.7 GPA, Entertainment Editor of my school newspaper, Program Director of WRIU radio station, an internship at The Hartford Courant, a freelance writer for Verge Campus online magazine, and my poems have been published in two national books. So for all of those people, I'm ready to prove you wrong...and this is just the beginning.