Wait, what?! A page about ME?! Why?!? o.O
I'm not sure why, but for some reason I'm compelled to tell my readers a little about who I am. This will probably be my least visited page, but whatever...there might be people out there who care.
So, I am currently 17 years old (it's 2008 right now, people...in case I forget to update the age thing) and a senior in high school. I live somewhere in Southern California, USA, though I wish I lived in either London, England, or Tokyo, Japan. I've been writing as long as I can remember (at least since third grade, or whenever Fantasia 2000 came out). I started small, mostly fan fiction at first, then moved up to short stories and soon to full-length novels, which have now become my passion (for the fools interested in my fan fiction, go to http://www.fanfiction.net/~alexstarr).
Though I'd dabbled in storytelling with my parents and in journals forever, my first foray into real writing was in fifth grade, when I developed a very intricate Sailor Moon fanfic, in which I created this alter ego of mine, Alex Starr (those of you who know my real name, keep it to yourself, ne? I'd rather not broadcast myself on the Internet). I was very proud of the whole story, as I felt I'd manage to snake my plot very realistically through the established plot of the series itself. Alex was Sailor Sun, a joke I keep alive even now (sad, no?), and supposedly Darien's old flame in the past/future or whatever. It was actually just the result of my girlie crush on Tuxedo Mask, but it was something I was very proud of at the time (and really still am now). However, the sad reality that my story would never be published because it was only FanFiction haunted me, and I eventually gave up on the thing.
Sixth grade yielded a turn in my writing. After four periods of core classes and one of PE, 6th period was either band, ROP classes, or "Elective Wheel," which was a rotation of several 4- to 5-week classes designed to get us interested in subjects we might see as electives in high school. After enduring Architechtural Design, Spanish, ASL, Computers, and Music History, I got to take Creative Writing, which was the major turning point of which I speak. I discovered a love for original fiction there, and found I was quite good at the love-'em-and-leave-'em style necessary for two-page short story writing.
As the four weeks came to a close, I wrote an untitled story in which a girl named Jenethea (named for my Grandma's cool middle name) falls into a pool and is rescued by what she sees is a demon, but what is really a counselor at a mental ward. It was supposed to show how, in the eye of the beholder, some things just weren't what they seemed, especially when the eye of the beholder was obviously schizophrenic. I thought it was great, but I may never know - I handed it in on the second-to-last day of the class, and the teacher simply threw away all the stories he hadn't graded at the end. Angry and thirsty to prove how great the story really was, I vowed to write the story over, but this time it wouldn't be some short story to be easily discarded - it would be a full-length novel, something to be proud of, and it would make me famous.
Jenethea would be my driving force and my insane passion for the next two years after that. I spent countless hours working on it, on my computer at home at my dad's, on the computers in the library while at my mom's. I planned everything out in my head, characters, plots, locations - I even developed a way for it to be a kind of series, with Jenethea at the head, a sequel about another kid with a similar dilemma, and a third in which the two joined forces and defeated their illnesses together. I finally finished it the summer between eighth and ninth grade, finding it finally perfect, and I went through all the motions of getting it published. No one wanted anything to do with it, which I didn't understand at all at the time. Eager to prove its worth, I read the book aloud to my mom - with disastrous results. I suddenly saw every scene that needed improvement, every character who needed development, every place I could have made it great but simply hadn't. I hated it, hated every piece of it I read, and soon put it on the shelf, vowing to rewrite the entire thing before letting anyone near it again.
Years passed, Jenethea remained on my shelf. Around the beginning of sophomore year (10th grade, for my international readers), I started work again, but this time it was on the book intended as the second of the trilogy, Matthew, the original name for this book. I wrote some very basic chapter designs for it, none of it too complex or meant to become anything, but it soon sprung forth into what I have posted here now under the new title Internal Conflict.
Almost everything about Internal Conflict is what I wanted Jenethea to be, but I think Jenethea was doomed from the start. I wanted her to be this horribly unrealistic character one could only make work in a gothic comic book, and the story simply wasn't developed enough. I had elements I wanted to use in the story to work with and that was all. With IC, I have a plot, characters, even most of an ending planned. It's becoming everything I want it to be, and I'm very happy with it. However, to keep myself happy, I have to keep up the quality of the work, which in turn means I can't crank out the chapters like I used to with Jenethea. It's a good thing in the end, but it does make me a little frustrated, considering I'm pretty results-oriented and my low number of chapters gets annoying.
Well, this turned out to be a lot more in-depth than I had originally planned...but oh well. Now you know. Should you wish to know even MORE about me, email me at internalconflictnovel@ymail.com.