For a lot of my life, I was just a dumb kid who smashed angry words together and called it "poetry." For all four years of high school, I was a dumb kid who strung quotes together with background details and called it "journalism." In the time between graduation and the start of my freshman year of college, I was just a dumb kid.

I've never really had any grand plans for my writing-- I was just kind of planning on writing because it helps me be okay with things. It wasn't until I got to college that I realized just writing wouldn't hack it. Women here were going to be published authors, their works shelved in The Hollins Room of the library, perhaps the most beautiful part of the Wyndham Robertson Library. This was a big deal, and it was something I worked out on my dinky little poetry blog that never got more than a handful of hits. I didn't mind it because I didn't write for other people. Neither did the girl in my first-year seminar, but she was just nineteen-years-old and she'd already published a book.

Seriously.

Her name was Abigail Hall, but the girl with the blue-grey hair introduced herself as Abby. She had four piercings in each ear and wore overalls with Winnie the Pooh on them. She was eccentric and well-put together, and I immediately latched onto her. She'd told me about her book, Happenstance, but it took me a full two months before I got around to reading it. It was available on Amazon for $18, and even though I didn't know when I'd be able to swing the small expense, I told her I'd buy it.

Here was this girl whose favorite color I don't know, and there was me, the messy English major with nothing to show for it offering to buy her book. Well, I didn't have to buy her book to read it-- she loaned me her only copy and I read it throughout the following week.

Happenstance was something else. Abby intricately details the life of goofy yet serious Caprice after she chances upon half-elf Rune in another world. The novel, which is the first in an upcoming trilogy, mixes Abby's personal life with fictitious events and characters in a way that was so enchanting I had a hard time separating what was real from what wasn't.

I couldn't stop grinning after she swung by my room one day; I had the thick paperback sitting on my chest, one hand holding it open when she walked through the open door and started giggling and bouncing around-- "You're reading MY book!" But I wasn't just reading Abby's book-- I was reading Abby.

There's a sort of honesty I feel writers generally adopt in that a great deal of themselves is present in their piece, yet they don't come right out and say it. Happenstance was a unique experience in that I had a bit of background knowledge about this girl and her book but there was so much more I learned about her through reading the book.

Abby, you didn't know me like you know me now, but you trusted me with yourself, and even if you don't know it, you've made me more okay with myself, both as a writer and a person, and I feel more capable because of it.

During my first semester of college, I was just a dumb writer who was fortunate enough to have someone braver and closer than anyone else pave the way for my future in storytelling. That's what I'm here for.