August 11, 2012

Greetings, followers. Let me start by telling you thank you for following my journey into authorship. It's been a year since I started my blog Exploited Antonyms and in that time I feel I've grown as not only an author, but as a person as well. I appreciate the comments I've received from friends and family alike, they have helped me along tremendously.

When I started this blog, it began as my personal writing space; a platform from which I could share my thoughts and my poetry. Towards the end of August, however, I wrote the first chapter of a story I intended to wrap up in no long time. That story was Liberation: Chapter 1. Somewhere after authoring the third chapter, I realized the importance of such a story; it was something my fans could look forward to. As such, I continued it at an irregular pace, making time for other writing topics and opportunities to allow myself to grow as a writer.

It wasn't until January, however, that the idea for me to write a full-length novel crossed my mind. However, the longer I worked on forming the basis of the story, the more I realized what an immense task it was to write a book on the scale I desired. It literally took me months of brainstorming, writing, re-writing, trashing ideas, and several instances of tearing my hair out to settle on the premise and beginning point. I'm happy to report that I'm 2 chapters in, and Liberation: Chapter 6 is well on it's way out of the stalls.

Seeing how I've been at this for an entire year already, I'll tell you a little about myself:

As you might have guessed from reading Liberation, I'm from Florida. I wasn't born in Florida, however, I moved here from Missouri when I was 13; that was 12 years ago.  For those 12 years I went through middle school, high school, and college all without leaving the vicinity of Naples, Florida. My original plan was to become a high school teacher in the language arts in Naples, but as fate would have it, Naples wasn't where I was meant to settle.

As little as two weeks ago I finally got all of my things together and moved to Orlando, where my current plans are to enroll to UCF in the spring as a graduate student. So far the move has been a pleasant one; I've adapted my habits to Orlando without so much as a hiccup. And while I like the downtown area of Orlando I'm even more impressed with the vast number of conveniently-located Starbucks whose wifi becomes the vessel to further my craft... and downloading Breaking Bad every week.

Anyways, seeing as how I'm at work now I need to wrap this up. I've been having customers come in at the worst times all day today. That and I have actual work to do around the store.

This last year has been a fun and enlightening one, I look forward to another full of writing.

-Mr. H