Happy Birthday to Me!

by Jill Williamson

First, a bit about my writing spaces. Here is my desk.

And here is my treadmill desk.

The treadmill desk was easy to make. I know it's not ideal since my head has to look so far down, but it's so nice to get out of the chair, I like it. I wrote a blog post on how I created this desk. Click here to read about my tips for staying healthy while you write.

Now, guess what?

My official GTW age is one today! What in the galaxy does that mean? Simply that I've been blogging with Stephanie on the Go Teen Writers blog for one year.

*blows noisemaker*

Joining this blog has been one of the best decisions of my life. I'm so thankful that Stephanie asked me to come. I've gotten to know her so much better and am thrilled to count her as a friend. I've also gotten to know many of you, which has been so much fun. Blogging for you guys keeps me learning. Plus Stephanie and I wrote the Go Teen Writers book, which I wouldn't have done if I'd stayed all by myself over there on my author blog where crickets were more prevalent than comments.

Life at Go Teen Writers is pretty cool.

It's been a lot of hard work, though. Stephanie and I always do our best to write posts that will be educational and interesting, but sometimes blog posts are hit and miss. 

So let's forget all about those "miss" posts of last year and take a moment to reminisce about the "hits" or the posts I like to call "a blast to write." 

The first four posts I wrote for Go Teen Writers were about fight scenes. I like fighting. Not in real life, of course, but I like it in fiction. In fact, I just worked on a karate scene today for Project Gemini. It was fun. And I had so much fun writing those four fighting posts. Here are links to them again if you never saw them and care about fighting in fiction:

-Writing the Action/Fight Scene (Click to read original post.)

-Editing the Action Scene: Seven Ways to Make it Stronger (Click to read original post.)

-The Wizard's Duel (Click to read original post.)

-Writing the Great War (Click to read original post.)

I got super silly writing a post about using the Dora the Explorer formula to plot out a quest novel. And I actually printed out my post on choosing names for your characters to help myself as I've been brainstorming a new fantasy novel and wanted to try and create a naming system that was unique to my land.

Strange as it may sound, one of my favorite posts was the one titled To Swear or Not to Swear. I loved reading the discussion that followed in the comments about swearing in fiction.

I also loved reading all the stories behind your stories in the comments of that post, which talked about where you got the ideas for your books.

But my absolute favorite ... the posts that made me laugh and laugh ... were the two in which I invented The Crowl and told the story of its journey to publication. I'm still waiting for one of you to write that book. It's already got a cover and everything! Click here for part one and here for part two of those posts on the publishing process.

I'm hoping that this next year will bring as much fun and laughter as this year brought. Thanks for letting me talk to you guys about writing fiction. And thanks for loving writing as much as I do. Keep on reading and writing!