Thursday, January 1, 2009

Every Resolution Road has its Beginning.

It was New Year's Eve at my favorite local music club. The rock n' roll music was flowing, the alcoholic drinks were pouring, and my busy mind was buzzing: I should write about this. Yes, I resolve to write, to blog; I resolve to join the 21st century and become a blogger.

I've always been a writer. I had my first story "published" in the Woodridge Elementary School library when I was in advanced kindergarten. It was a story about a poor Native American girl who discovered gold, became a princess and saved her struggling village. As I continued writing for school, I mostly stuck to the telling of true events and shied away from fiction.

I wrote stories about the adventures my friends and I had in our neighborhood, stories about my pets, sometimes I even wrote about the things that hit close to home like seeing my dad for the first time after he got of jail or dealing with my grandma's death. I liked keeping a record of my life.

I did write another fiction story for a writing contest my sophomore year in high school. This time the story dealt with the more somber issue of a depressed high school girl considering suicide. The story was quite a gamble for me, but it paid off. I won the contest and won a sum of money, too. I liked getting paid for my writing; I liked it a lot, but I still hadn't decided to become a writer.

Around this same time, I began writing show reviews (that is local concert reviews) for an online zine called LoCal MuSac run by enthusaistic high school students. I became more and more involved with LoCal MuSac and eventually became the editor of the zine, which amassed around 300 email subscribers. I loved it. I wrote show reviews, CD reviews, interviewed bands and made impassioned pleas for local music fans to support their scene.

Like all good things run by high school students who grow up to be busy college students, the zine eventually came to an end. My passion for writing did not.

My experience writing for the zine led to many opportunities for me, as well as a career path. I got (my then) dream job as a scout for my favorite major record label: Warner Bros. I worked for the Reprise Records division, the very same division my favorite band Green Day was on. I continued writing show reviews for a new local print publication called Ricochet Magazine. It was so cool to go to Dimple Records and pick up a copy of the magazine and see my name and my show review in it. Oh, did I mention? I also decided to major in journalism at Sacramento State University. As I found a new passion in politics, I adjusted my major to Government-Journalism so that I could have a background in political science if I chose to write about it.

Although I came to love the government department more than the journalism department at Sac State, I did well in both and received such honors as graduating Cum Laude with membership in the Phi Kappa Phi and Golden Key honour societies. Before I left Sac State, I also was published in Prosper Magazine, a Sacramento business magazine. My story was not your typical business story.

I have continued to freelance for magazines and in 2008, at 24 years of age, landed my first writing gig for a national magazine. I have always kept an online journal at livejournal.com. I write in it daily, sometimes several times a day, but it is just a way of record keeping. I mostly ramble and rant in it and it's nothing I would want open for public viewing.

So now, today, January 1st, 2009, I begin a new writing adventure: blogging.

What will this blog be? The truth is, I don't exactly know. It will be a bit of everything, and if I get stuck, I'm likely to use to use a writer's block prompt. Even if no one reads this, as long as I commit to writing on a regular basis with the intention that an audience might read it, I will achieve my goal. This is my resolution road.

1 comment:

  1. I will be reading! I've already added the feed for this to my feed reader, and I'll Stumble it, too.

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