When I was little, believe it or not, I hated reading.  I always seen it as a chore and not as something someone did for fun.  But writing?  I loved it!  (Even though I sucked at spelling, I wrote pretty good stories!)  I seen writing as a way to escape normal life and write myself into whatever situation or place I wanted to be in!

My brother was the opposite of me..  He was reading Harry Potter by the time he was in first grade, and reading college books by time he was in middle school!  But heaven forbid he ever had to write anything!  He hated writing (with a passion)!

After a few years of being in public school, my mother decided to homeschool my brother and I.  With that, came a new routine for our school days..

One of the things she made us do in the morning (to get me more into reading) was we had to spend an hour each morning reading.  It started out with a book of our choosing, but there were no books I wanted to read..  And any book she gave me, would take the whole hour just to read a few pages! (Yeah.  I was that slow at reading..)

Because of my slow reading pace (and my mother suspecting that I wasn’t even ‘trying’ to read), she enlisted the help of her mother (my grandmother) to help me read.  I was forced to call my grandmother and read to her for an hour a day!  We started out with the book series ‘The Magic Treehouse‘ (which is now one of my favorites), and slowly transitioned into the ‘Narnia‘ series.

After a while, my mother started to see that I didn’t really mind books so much.  So what does she do?  She extended reading hour to two hours every morning(!!!); one hour for a book of our choosing, and one hour for a school related book with my grandmother on the phone.

Eventually, it switched back to one hour, and I no longer needed to call my grandmother so that my mother could make sure I was reading.  (The proof that I liked reading was in the amount of books I went through slowly but surly).

With all of that reading I was doing, my writing slowly started to improve.  I started writing about myself in all of these lands that I read about, and I slowly started creating lands of my own as well.

It was at this point that my mother realized she had created a monster..

I was going through books like crazy, and spending most of my time writing..  I had read almost all of the Narnia series by then, all of the Harry Potter series, I had been slowly working on the Twilight series, not to mention all of the school related books I had been given to read (Secret Garden, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, etc.).  Besides reading, I had started to write about anything and everything I could think of!  Anything I couldn’t find in a book, I would write about myself.  And although I wasn’t the ‘best’ at writing, I still went on many adventures through my writing!

Putting writing short stories aside, I have always had a passion for writing.  Whether it was writing long letters to my friends, writing songs to play on my guitar, or even just writing in my journal, that passion has never faded.  And although I don’t write songs or short stories too much anymore, I have found another passion that my writing skills have served me good in.

That’s where this blog came in!  When a friend inspired me to start this blog, I thought: ‘another opportunity to write!’  And now that I’m a year and a half into it?  I still love writing everyday. ❤ (As is proof with my Blogmas posts!)

Someone once told me that the more you read, the better you write.  Which I think is 100% true!  When you read other peoples writing, you’re introduced to different kinds of writing styles, different words you didn’t know before, different life situations, and you get to know people on a whole other level!

I still find it funny sometimes, when I look back at the stubborn little girl I once was..  The little girl who refused to read, who found books boring, and who spelled almost everything wrong. (I still cringe at some of my old writing sometimes, because of the spelling.)  And then to look at who I am now..!  Someone who loves writing her blog about homesteading and college, someone who looks forward to any type of schoolwork that involves writing a long paper, and as someone who asks for books for Christmas (only to read them all before new years. :P), I have truly gown as a person because of books.

 

“We should never forget who we were,

because who we were made us who we are today.”

 

Follow your heart at all times.  Because sometimes you find your passion, and sometimes your passion finds you.  (And other times, your passion is forced upon you by your mother..)

Have an amazing day!  Stay warm this winter.  And curl up and read a good book (or write one of your own)!

 

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