Two Bloggers in the House.

I think I was about 14 when I started seriously thinking of myself as a writer.  Our daughter, on the other hand has been writing things down since grade school. For years now she's been personally supporting the composition book industry, but in the last two or three years she has really started taking it seriously.

She set herself up a blog page that she posts to occasionally, but currently fancies fiction more than biography, so she does most of her work on Wattpad and fanfiction.net. Over the last two months she wrote a complete Teen Titans adventure of more than 40,000 words on FanFic. She gets more followers than I do.

The fact that my child has  the nerve to put her  writing out (even under a pseudonym) at an age when I was hiding my notebooks from everyone is amazing.

Now she has taken things up a notch by deciding to participate in NaNoWriMo. She has spent the last week  planning out some thirty chapters of her next work, so that she can have a general idea of where she is going.

I am proud of her, and awed by the extent of the task she is undertaking. Part of the  reason is that I am not good at long pieces, which is why I like blogging and writing poetry.  Even when I wrote plays in college, my best work was biographical in nature, so the plot line was already in place for me.  (On the other hand, I'm great at polishing dialogue. I could be a fantastic script doctor. Are you listening Hollywood?) Although I occasionally work on my 911 memoir that I don't plan to publish till I'm retired, it's mostly a matter of note taking at this point.  The thought of writing a full length work of fiction is intimidating.

It should be stated that having two authors in the same house can have some interesting results.  There are nice advantages like having a proofreader right there in the room to look over  what you have written. We take each others profile pictures. We understand the need to stop in the middle of whatever we are doing to write things down.  We bounce plot ideas off each other, and critique other writings we encounter on line. We're even planning to go to BloggyCon together next year. On the other hand we both compete for the services of a well traveled and well worn laptop, because its the one that has all the documents and pictures saved to it (and the desktop, aka El Diablo XP, is slower than frozen molasses).

But mostly it's fun having another writer in the living room.  The Girl has always been more like her dad, with her music and language  aptitudes, and its good to have something in common with her. Writing gives us communication space that mothers and teenage daughters seldom have. We are able to meet each other as writers and artists.  And that's a great feeling to have.