Jasmine the Writer

Jasmine Fox has been around the Sun forty one and a half times since she was born, and has spent a good portion of that orbit with her funny looking nose in a book of some sort.

Legend has it that she read a newspaper from cover to cover during her fourth rotation; although she herself doubts this as the sports section can't have interested her then, any more than it does now—

No, no, I can't. Stopping that immediately.

You are not Dwayne Johnson, Jasmine.

I mean, I'm not.

A-hem...

Fiction has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Didn't much matter whether I was reading it, watching it, telling or writing it; the places I could go, the adventures waiting for my imagination.

My earliest stories were for my brother and sister — I would pretend-read them from an old shopping receipt in the back of the car. Apparently I was alright at it.

During my first year of Junior school, I wrote and illustrated my very first 'book'. I loved the entire process, sewing the few sheets of paper together myself, drawing the cover, and filling it with my neatest handwriting.

The best in the class would win a prize. Which I...didn't win. Princess Aurora Antelope could not compete with a hedgehog?bear?beaver? who needed to learn to swim. I was more than gutted, but even I could admit that 'try until you succeed' was a more educational message than 'imagine you got your wish for a day'.

The next year I came third in a district-wide poetry contest, which sort of made up for it — I won a blue, plastic piggy bank. And my first lever arch file 😁

I can't tell you the feeling I got knowing that some all-powerful contest judge read my words and liked them enough to tell someone else (to my 8-year-old brain, all judges wore black, sat on really high chairs and were very hard to please). I was hooked. Top of my Christmas list that year: TYPEWRITER.

I was going to be the youngest author, ever.

Nope. That didn't happen either. Obviously.

I met my Inner Critic shortly after unboxing my Petite 990* — which was also blue and plastic — I hated every single thing I started, convinced it was all just silly, and childish (never mind that I was a child). Pages upon pages of opening lines, and huge empty spaces. Not one finished story.

Joining InnCri on the Self-sabotage Squad was The Perfectionist, or TP as I like to call her because those early pages might as well have been toilet paper for all the joy they brought to the world. I'd type a few sentences, make a mistake (Mavis Beacon, I was not), get annoyed at myself** and start all over again.

Rounding out the SS Squad, Imposter Syndrome showed up, the Big-Bad — at least the other two can be a little useful — ImpoSyn is just a bully, who lies, and makes fun, and beats his victims dreams out of them. Who was I kidding? How could anything I created possibly inspire anyone?

Throughout high school, I took to writing in notebooks. I'd stick to gritty, real world terror, about war-torn families, and abusive cults (apart from that one with the vengeful ghost-girl, who offed her victims with nursery rhymes***, and The Lizard of Woz), all things that I knew nothing about but would, imho, be taken seriously by my literary peers. Very pretentious, considering I'd never let anyone read them.

But no matter how I felt about my own writing, I needed books like air. At lunchtimes, the school library was my place, there wasn't a fantasy book on its shelves that I hadn't checked out. I always had a book on my desk in lessons, and would sneak a paragraph or two whenever I thought I could get away with it, which admittedly wasn't the best way to learn, but I did okay in my work (when I finished). Reading in class was the only thing I ever got in trouble for on a regular basis.

Of course, now I know this was all leading up to my becoming the awesomely mad, hat-cat-coffee- loving dream-weaver I am today.

*Fun fact: Deciding to Google search my first 'serious' piece of writer kit set me back several hours. "Never look back; it detracts from the now." - Edna Mode, The Incredibles (2004).

**It was always my fault, never the typewriter, which incidentally was a toy and unlikely ever to produce professional-looking documents. Seriously, the typesetting is even wonky on the advert. Yes, I Googled that too.

***Goosebumps and Point Horror phase, anyone?