Every Good Word Writing Tag

There's a new writing blog, for writers, by writers! And although I could say a lot about it, I'll just let you visit the blog, Every Good Word, and see for yourself. Yes, I'm sorry I'm like that. Please accept my weirdness. I'm a writer after all.

Anywho, I saw this spiffy, little tag popping up on a handful of my friends' blogs, and then decided I had to do it, too. Am I using this to get me back into a writing mood, hoping this questionnaire will get the creative juices flowing again? Maybe....

1. What was your first-ever piece of writing? Hmm... that was a long time ago. I think it was a short story about my oldest sister, my two cousins, and myself all being sets of twins, and it was our birthday. I didn't know at that time how to spell "for" correctly so it always came out "fo." That was definitely interesting. Actually, the two biggest characters in the story were my younger sister, Jessa, and her best friend/partner in crime/cousin, Captain Oblivious. They made cards for the "twins," and they made good cards. :)
2. How old were you when you first began writing? When I wrote the twins story, I couldn't have been more than 6 or so. But it wasn't until I turned 15 that I really began writing stories, real stories.
3. Name two writing goals. One short term & one long term. That's difficult to say, because I'm in a stalemate at the moment. I really want to finish editing Children of a Legend and finish the first draft of Rebirth of a Legend, but at the same time I really want to finish writing The Twelfth Kingdom, and I've been bursting with inspiration for two stories I really haven't begun to work on in earnest: Black Fox and Kianna. What to do? What to do? I s'pose I should stick with CoaL and RoaL. So, short term? Finish chapter 14 and get to that all-exciting scene in RoaL, and long term... get CoaL polished and published. Not sure when that's gonna happen, but we'll see.
4. Do you write fiction or non-fiction? Fiction!
5. Bouncing off of question 4, what's your favorite genre to write in? Absolute favorite? Fantasy. Epic fantasy. Not that fluffy, modern thing people call fantasy today. I mean the good, old fashioned fantasy that Tolkien and Lewis wrote.
6. One writing lesson you've learned since 2013 began. Editing is never easy. Some people can say it is, but it isn't. For me, if it only involved going through and catching all grammar and spelling mistakes, it'd be a breeze! However, finding plot holes and character flaws and all that other stuff... the rewriting of it all takes a lot out of you. And you thought just brain dumping the story out in the first place was hard!
7. Favorite author, off the top of your head! C.S. Lewis. I love how he words things in his books. "And as for sweets, I won't tell you how good and cheap they were, for it would just make your mouth water in vain." :)
8. Three current favorite books. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (probably my favorite Dickens so far!!), Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien. And they may or may not be the last few books that I read...
9. Biggest influence on your writing {person}: My dad. I know it might sound cliche, but my dad has influenced my writing like no other person has. He was a teacher, so personally, I consider him one of the smartest people in the world. ;) He is a hard but wonderful critic and knows both when to give praise and when to hold back on giving it. He's always telling me, "Never fall in love with your writing." One is always working on writing; there is no set goal that you can reach and then become a perfect writer. The moment you fall in love with your work, that becomes the moment you stop growing, and your writing will never get any better. It's been a hard lesson to learn, but I know that I'm better for my dad drilling that into me.
10. What's your go-to writing music? Soundtracks. Current favorites to play while working on RoaL: HTTYD (by John Powell), Eragon (by Patrick Doyle), and Peter Pan (by James Newton Howard). Granted, I don't endorse all these movies or all the songs, but the majority of this music is amazing. Hence the reason I listen to it while writing.
11. List three to five writing quirks of your's! Little habits, must-haves as you write, etc. 1) I love having music playing, although it can't be anything with words (learned that the hard way - I tend to sing instead of write). 2) I cannot stand when people watch me type. Don't know why, but it really annoys me. 3) I usually have two documents open: the actual story, and the story info. 4) The more excited I get about a scene or a line of dialogue, the faster I type. I don't type correctly all the time, but I use most of my fingers and I'm so well-acquainted with the keyboard that I can type entire sentences without looking at the computer screen or my fingers. The word I misspell the most is "the." It always comes out "teh." Go figure, eh?
12. What, in three sentences or less, does your writing mean to you? I don't write stories to sell them. I write the books that I want to read. So often, I will pick up a book, a story that someone has said is great, and then put it down only after reading a few pages because there was something... well, wrong with it. It's not necessarily that I'm picky, but there are certain things that don't belong in stories (grammatical mistakes as a small thing, immoral behavior as a large thing). Seeing as we're here to glorify God, I don't want to waste my time reading books that aren't going to encourage me, give me something to chew on, that kind of thing. The stories I write are the stories that I want to read, stories that I love, stories I want to give the world. It doesn't matter if I'm not famous or a bestseller. I want stories that will point my readers to the Lord, stories I will not be ashamed of.

God bless!