Emergency Medical Dad

closing thoughts

hey guys. 

so, the end of this book marks the end of the official wolves series. 

now, that doesn't mean it's going to be the last of the content from them, or from me, I do have a few shorts that I have saved and that I need to edit, but this is the end of the series. 

as a sort of farewell, i would like to give a bit of background on what sparked this and who I am as a writer so you guys know where I'm coming from and what this series means. 

I started writing books when I was nine. the first time I put pen to paper to write it was, admittedly, basically harry potter plagiarism, but that little red composition book with my gross handwriting and about fifteen pages of content is still stuffed in some bookshelf in my house. after that, I managed to convince my parents, both of whom are very much STEM people (hi mom), that I wanted to be an author more than anything in the world. they didn't know what to do with me. I mean, how would they have anticipated that? an engineer and a chemist and their kid is asking for advice on creative writing. 

they gave me a flash drive, eight gigabytes, and computer time. I was probably the fastest typer my elementary school computer science teacher had ever seen. 

i wrote my first full story at eleven. to this day, I remember the little headrush of finishing it and looking back at the document, a whopping forty two pages, double spaced, and thinking this is it, I've done it. that book, unnamed, full of gryphons and floating islands and an evil group chasing after magical people called the Plague, is still on a flash drive in my room at home. 

between that and my next story, middle school passed. I didn't write much more than the beginnings of books, the first twenty pages or so. Something about an underground bunker named Carbon 14, a family whos house had rock climbing walls instead of staircases, flying jet skis. 

Middle school, for me, actually wasn't the worst. Surprisingly. I had a good group of friends, a crush for going on two years that I never actually ended up dating, two sports, ski club in the winter, good grades. It wasn't that bad but I didn't write. Maybe a little here and there but I was so disheartened by never finishing stories that my wish was fizzling out. It was a dream that I thought, right there, was going to end. Nobody gets published, right? especially not thirteen year olds, right? 

Everything shifted again as I hit high school, I lost most of my friends to a big fight at the end of eighth grade and my childhood best friend switched schools. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I did know that I didn't have much when it came to friends. 

so, I did what I'd been doing beforehand, before middle school, I got back into writing. At first, it was, and I will be honest, self insert fanfic. but it was still something. I fought with it, and I fought hard, but it picked up my skill. 

I wrote my second book during the spring of my freshman year. I knew I couldn't finish anything in the fantasy worlds I was working with beforehand, it was too much too quickly. So I decided that something easier, something I could follow with more coherence, was a single-plot romance. Cardboard Cutouts was less about the plot, less about the skill, less about the style of my writing and more about the sheer victory it was to finish something again. to have written something, start to finish, with characters and a world and social tensions and a romance. 

I spent most of the summer editing it because hell, I'd written a book. I was going to get it published. I just had to edit it first. I didn't end up making it all the way through. 

Midwinter of the next year, tenth grade, I wrote my third book, a curious thing with ghosts and urban fantasy and found family. I was in the same spot I was the previous year, socially strained, mostly left to my own devices, but I had picked up something harder, something with more plot. I was getting there.