Hey there, thanks for stopping by. Chances are, if you are reading this, then you either know me or have read my work. In case you don't fall into either of those categories, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself. If you do fit into one or both of those categories, read on. I don't think any of you short of my mother or sister knows the entire story. And some parts may even be news to them. My name is Shayna Gier, I'm 21 years old and I love to write. I've been writing since I learned how to form words into sentences, first for schoolwork, and then in order to write stories of my own free will.
When I was in kindergarten, I had my first work published publicly where people other than my mommy and daddy could read it. I don't know if anyone else actually read it, but they could have. The piece of writing that was published was a personal narrative (though I just called it my story at the time) called Chocolate Chip Cookies. The prose was simple, the entire story sounding very much like a child wrote it. I wrote it for a school project. As such, it's final form (minus it's publication in a district-wide publication) was in a book shaped like a chocolate chip cookie and laminated. I also did the drawings for my first ever picture book.
Shortly after kindergarten, I was again featured in the same district-wide literary showcase. I think I was in second grade that time. And if I'm not mistaken it was for a poem I had written. As poetry is neither my forte' or something I particularly enjoy, I don't remember much concerning the details of this publication. My work, if I remember correctly, was chosen for showcase in the same publication in fifth grade as well. I recall nothing of what that publication was.
After my early publications, the next time I remember picking up a pen was when I was in seventh grade. This time, I had been at home durring a President's Day weekend, watching a Jimmy Neutron marathon. Jimmy Neutron was new to Nickelodeon, only having been on the air for a little more than three or so months. I hadn't watched the show before that day, but I was bored and not at all inclined to go outside and play like others my age might have, so I sat on the couch and watched as Nickelodeon played every Jimmy Neutron episode they had in circulation. As it was still a new show, there were only six episodes, which took a total of three hours to show. When they finished the line up, they re-showed the six episodes again. I'm not one for repetitiveness, so I turned off the TV. I liked the show, but I had no clue that I had just entered into a phase of my life that, while it would end, would echo for years and years to come. I was enthralled with the characters, and not at all pleased that the show only had three hours worth of episodes to watch. I thought it was a great show and should continue throughout the day. And it did, in time. Jimmy Neutron aired new episodes for a good three to five seasons, all of which I was an avid watcher. So, frustrated at the brevity of the marathon (I mean, seriously, who ever heard of a three hour marathon?) I went back to my dad's office and collected about ten pieces of loose-leaf notebook paper, and I set to writing my first out-of school writing.
I quickly filled those ten pages, front and back, and got more paper. Eventually, over the next few weeks or months (can't remember how long it took) I completed my first multi-chapter story. It was a fan-fic about Jimmy having won a trip to Paris. In the show, Jimmy was a fifth-grader, but as my sister was around that age in real life, I moved his age up a few years so that I could identify with him better, not to mention it gave me a bit more freedom without having to worry about the oppressiveness of a fifth-grader's parent. As he was in middle school, he and Cindy Vortex were assigned the Baby Think-It-Over project, and they had to take the dolls to Paris with them. Thanks to one of Jimmy's inventions though, the babies came to life. The entire plot revolved around these 5 teens in Paris trying to have fun, but also having to act like real parents. The dolls, once alive, had to eat, have their diapers changed, and everything else real babies do.
I wrote the entire story out by hand, but I had found out, thanks to commercials, that Nickelodeon had a website. My parents weren't huge on letting me on the computer to talk to strangers, but I told them all about Nickelodeon's safe chat rules. I was finally granted permission to create an account, with which I began the painstaking process of converting my story from handwritten script (which I had written it in as a shortcut to using those dreaded complete sentences that I was forced to write at school. By writing in script I didn't have to write out he said/she said.) to typed out story/novel format. I never finished that project, and I never ever wrote script again.
My story, titled The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron in: Love, or Something Like It, was a hit on the forums, however poorly it was written. And I soon began to write other stories. I made a sequel to Love, Or Something Like It (which I began to call, as I will later, LOSLI). I wrote stories in which my friends that I had made from the forum, like Stacey and Dani made appearances, as well as myself. I even co-wrote a few stories that never got finished with my sister, and with Dani and Stacey, whose stories I greatly enjoyed. I even took the world of Jimmy Neutron, and placed it at the end of the world, combining Jimmy Neutron into my version of the plot of the Christian-fiction bestseller Left Behind series. By that time my writing had improved greatly from LOSLI.
The Left Behind/Jimmy Neutron story was plotted out to be about 7 books long. I got two of them finished, but the series died in the third book. That was pretty much the end of my Jimmy Neutron phase, as well as the end of my writing fan-fiction. As my writing got better, it got harder to read the other people whose writing just wasn't quite as talented as they would like it to be. I don't say that to be mean, it's true. Fan-fiction is full of bad writing, no matter what topic the fan-fiction is about. It's the breeding ground of writing, where many writers, like myself, start out at, and as such it's full of badly written stories. Not all of it is bad, there are jewels to be found, but they are just few and far between.
After my stories of Jimmy Neutron faded away, I began playing in personal fiction (at least that's what I'm going to call it). Through Jimmy Neutron, I had made quite a few friends out of the readers of my fanfics. I began to write fictional stories about what it would be like to grow up with those kids, if we all grew up in the same city, if not the same neighborhood, as opposed to being spread around the United States, and even the world; as one of my very best friends was from England. I wrote about 4 different stories using just me and my friends and family. I was a competent writer at this point, starting high school, but not quite competent enough to completely make up entire main characters. I made up people, sure, to supplement classmates and other small, not-important characters in my personal fiction, but never endeavored to come up with a completely new set of characters, setting, and plot.
Starting in my Junior year of high school, I dropped the habit of using pre-made characters, or my friends and family, and began making up my own full set of characters. I wrote in school, when I probably should have been listening to teachers and taking notes. I took a creative writing course, in which I wrote my first truly competent fictional character in Lesly Timed. She was a short-story character who died in a car crash from rushing to her office work and gets to heaven where she realizes that she was just going through the motions and not really living her life. At the end of the story she has been spending years as guardian and friend to all the children who died on earth before having he chance to grow up, and is finally reunited with her husband and kids when they died in a plane crash. They spend eternity together with all the children Lesly watches over, and enjoy a full relationship without anyone taking advantage of anyone else.
I continued writing bits and pieces of different stories, most of which never made it to my hard drive for the next two years.
After I decided to drop out of college, mainly because I was bored and thought I'd better drop out while I stil only had under $10,000 in student debt versus waiting till it accumulated to being somewhere between $50,000 - $100,000, I enjoyed a six month relationship with my best friend until he called it off. It was probably the only time since my Jimmy Neutron days when I wasn't at least thinking of some story or another to write.
After he broke up with me, I sat down and began to write my first idea for a novel down. It was about a woman, Lillianna Rose Cardosa, who grew up without her father because he died in a car accident when she was four years old. Lilliana tells the story as she is holding her little baby in her arms, looking back on her own life. At four she was daddy's little girl. She was the most confident little girl in the world, secure in the love of her father and mother, and treated like a Princess by her dad. After his death, Lilliana quickly grows up, losing her childhood innocence and forever altering her life and who she was supposed to be. She becomes reclusive, until she becomes an adult and finds a great guy who she marries and slowly evolves into who she would have been all along. Or, at least that was the plot I had laid out. In fact, it was supposed to be a three-part story. Lilliana's early years after her father died (ages 4-10ish or so) in book one, mainly focusing on Lilliana coping with the loss of her father. In book two Lilliana was set to be a teenager, dealing with the fact that her mother has moved on and is in a relationship and getting married to the guy that was her dad's best friend, after he loses his wife to cancer. In book three Lilliana was set to meet her husband and begin to enjoy life for the first time. Still carrying the memory of her father with her, but living her own life at the same time.
Unfortunately, while writing Lillian's Story, I switched from PC to Mac and in the process I lost my manuscript file. I had printed the story out, but not backed it up, so I have a hard copy, but I couldn't really continue editing previous chapters that I had written without retyping it, and I didn't know where I left off on the last page I had written, so that story came to a halt, even though it had around 80,000 words of it typed out.
Since Lilliana, I have continued to write and have left even more characters hanging, though I do have most of those computer files, so they are there when or if I want to use them.
This year, I participated in my first contest, a 24 hour short story contest where they gave us a prompt and we had 24 hours to write a short story from it, and submit it. There were 500 contestants, and I placed in the top 10%. That story, Lucina's Gift, can be read here, if you would like to read it.
As you can see, I have always enjoyed writing and plan to continue enjoying it for many years to come. This year I was an official participant and winner in the National Novel Writing Month. That story, Stuck in Estrogen's Funhouse, in it's frist draft was posted as I wrote it on my blog.
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