I currently have 108 followers right here on WP. I am not counting the followers I have on Twitter and Facebook, which, when put together, make up a collective amount of over 500. I am amazed and in a little bit of shock.
I have been running this site for one year, and have been active on the Internet with my poetry for over three years now. I started out with my mom and a friend or two liking my posts to having people from countries all over the world retweeting, reblogging and liking my posts. I can’t believe that a little gal from the Midwest (not living there anymore, BTW!) could grow this big this fast.
I have had fans (I still can’t believe that I even HAVE fans!!!) make me photos that have things to do with my poems, have had other writers and poets tell me how they like my work and have had companies courting me that I never would have dreamed would ever look twice at something I wrote.
I have wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. My whole life I was making up stories in my head and, before I could write, I would draw them on any surface I could find. I wrote (well, recited, since I couldn’t really write until I was about four or five) my first sonnet when I was three and performed it for my family in our living room. This isn’t just a hobby for me and it never was–it is what I want my life to be about.
I have been able to read since I was two and a half and books (along with God, my mother and music) have been a saving grace for me my entire life; a way to leave this crappy “real world” behind and get lost in a castle in Transylvania, a vampire-infested town in Maine, a haunted Mansion in Dullsville, a wizard invading a small town in Utah, the crazy lands of Middle Earth or even a ghost-ridden fashion boutique in Atlanta, GA. They made me leave this place and took me on these amazing adventures in life, magic, death and love.
That is what I aim to do. Whether it is for teens with my YA vamp trilogy The Vampire Next Door or more mature readers with my Nicholas Sparks-esque romance novel Personal Heaven, I want to take the reader away from the real world for a little while and take them on a journey through my characters’ lives in London, the Bay Area, Chicago and Los Angeles; through their fighting magic, rogue vampires or even evil-minded ex-girlfriends. I want to give people the pleasure of reading that I always got from my favorite author’s books. I didn’t read for school, knowledge, because I was forced to–I read for fun and I always will.
I want to thank each and every one of you who follow me, who have been there since day one or even since just yesterday, because every follow and LIKE I receive means I have touched one more soul with my poetry and that means the world to me.
Thank you all so much for joining me on this crazy ride. I do this not for profit or fame, but for the love of words. Thank you all for being here and fasten your seatbelts–this is only the beginning!
xoxo LL
