Okay, well, I felt like writing something, probably since I was on TweeterDeck and Hayley G was all like, "I'ma gonna write in that there blog soon", which is totally what Hayley says because she's from Jersey or something and that down South you know they're total hicks. You know what else is down South? Yeah. Take that.

So I'm a little nerved 'cause my book from Amazin' is going to be here either tomorrow or Tuesday most to the likely. It's called Jeff Herman's Guide to Coal and Gold Mining: How Getting Your Hand's Dirty Can Result in Good Clean Fun.

No it isn't.

It's called...err...long title let me go look it up for the exact one...Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents. The 2009 edition. Which was published in late 2008. But no matter!

It was recommended to me by none other than Meg Cabot herself on her official website, so of course I, like Michael Buckley, had to have it. So it was ordered by my mother on Monday (my birthday) and should arrive, according to Amazon, in 7-10 days, though my mother says it usually takes less time than that.

I was thinking about, earlier, what I would do if it did get published and it made it somewhere. Whether it was the New York Times Bestseller List, Oprah's Fun-loving Bookity Book Club, or even just a shelve in my local Borders, like a senior that I knew who graduated this year and went off to a local, but private, college. I don't know if I want to spend my whole life being an author. Part of me wants to be something else. I want to major in liberal arts, not English, because English is so limited and with a liberal arts degree you can do pretty much anything. According to the Wikipedia...

The term liberal arts denotes a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student’s rational thought and intellectual capabilities[vague], unlike the professional, vocational, technical curricula emphasizing specialization. The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying art, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

Doesn't that sound just plain interesting to you? I discovered it the other day and it sounds exactly like what I want to do. I like a variety of subjects in school, and I've wanted to be a million different things growing up. In second grade I read every book in my school's library about planets. The ones with the breathtakingly vivid pictures anyway. I wanted to be an astronomer. In third grade I loved Math and wanted a Math-type career, and I think it was a similar interest in fourth grade as well. In fifth grade, I don't know, I think I just wanted to be older, or be a famous pop celebrity. In sixth grade I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a movie critic. In seventh grade I was fascinated with politics and government,and after visiting Washington D.C. I was convinced I was going to work as an environmental lawyer and study environmental law.

But all through elementary and middle school, people used to tell me, and I'm not bragging here, that I was a great writer. In first grade my writing piece about hiking through the woods was broadcasted in the cafeteria in the television for all to see, and my story about not being able to fall asleep one night and seeing things scared quite a few of my classmates. It was written on report cards. It was praised openly by teachers. I read obsessively, drinking in words, though throughout third and fourth grade it was mostly "The Babysitter's Club" series, to such a point that my mother made me take out different books and instructed the librarians to not let me check out any more of them. I wrote my own script for when I hosted our school's academic showcase, twice, and was told that I had a natural stage presence.

And I tried being a writer. My first real attempt at a full length story was, and I regret not keeping it, a story about a girl named Katie, who upon entering middle school, lost her best friend Natalie to the popular crowd. It wasn't the best written story, nor the most original plotline ever invented, but I poured my heart into it for a few weeks before getting frustrated with the lack of flowing direction and deleted it from the email form that I was writing it in. Once I got my own computer I wrote on Wordpad or Open Office, similar stories about girls with simple, everyday problems. I even had a "blog" that was actually a girl keeping an actual, real written diary, similar to Amber's, except much less witty and way more about a girl she knew with anorexia. I deleted that blog. That was me. I deleted everything that I hated, every time a storyline went sour, every time a character fell flat. I never got far in these stories, with lack of word count I estimate that the lucky ones got to maybe 8,000 words before I lost the point of the novel.

To this day I scoff at girls on television or in movies who proclaim, "I want to become a writer!" I think, "Yeah, good luck with that career." Even people around me, this girl in my grade who wanted to be the next Sarah Dessen. The thing about the writing career is, to make it, you can't be the next Anyone. You have to make it on originality, concept, the words. I didn't want to be someone as lost in a sea of others as a writer, constantly having to prove myself again and again, never stable, never comfortable. I wanted a career that I would immediately be accepted in, a career that I could be good at and nothing else.

But I loved almost every subject in school, except maybe P.E. and Math sometimes, when I didn't like the teacher or the work was too this or too that. I loved learning a new language, I loved the planets and our solar system, I'm still fascinated with early history, the dark times, anywhere from anytime B.C. to like, 1600 A.D. I adore. I loved baking things in FCS and feeling like a housewife. I loved drawing, even though I stunk at it royally, in art. I hated Tech Ed, which was basically Wood Shop, because I don't think wood from our precious trees should be wasted in my incapable hands. I liked working on the computers. I loved culture, things, observing (not stalking) people and their activities, guessing who they were. When my parents occasionally took us places like Boston or when we drove to DC or NYC on the highway, I liked looking at people in their cars and wondering why they were driving, who they were driving for, what they did for work. They didn't notice, they were driving.

That's part of the reason why I loved New York City, it was this big, organized blob of people, places, food, stores and shops. Somehow the people generally harmonized, usually by ignoring each other almost completely, focused completely on themselves. Here in New Hampshire, people try to spark conversation with you when you clearly didn't want to. I liked New York because I wasn't expected to socialize while walking on the street or buying something. I was expected to do what needed to be done and carry on my way.

But I've gotten a little off topic.

Anyway, I've been praised, yes, for my academics. For Science, for Math, for Latin and French, for Social Studies, even for Art and FCS, and especially for my English. I don't know, maybe this blog was for my own benefit, because that Book is coming and maybe I'll become an author and share Amber with the world. Maybe I'll go to the New School in Greenwich or Barnard or Columbia or NYU (one of the surefire ways to make it in Manhattan is to go to school there). Maybe I'll stay in New Hampshire all my life and be a stay at home mom and go to UNH, most likely with my current classmates and major in something stupid and dead ended like Comparative Literature (oh God I hope not). Or maybe my life will take me somewhere else entirely. I just want to be somewhere, you know? Have a niche in society where I can say honestly that I belong, whether it's the Writer's Guild or the Environmental Protection Agency or somewhere in Something City. And these days I can't say that I'm too young to think about these things. I'm entering high school next week.

This blog was probably for my own benefit, but I liked writing it. Finally plotting down all these swirling thoughts in my head. And actually, my headache's gone away and I need to go to the bathroom, so I'm just going to post this.

- Jerrica
Future Something or Other