I always wondered what talent I had growing up. I never could quite figure out what it was. I’m tall, athletic, strong, and reasonably smart. But I never excelled at sports(I have zero talent in that department) or did well in school. In fact, if you were to look at my grades in school since 6th grade, you’d be inclined to think my future would be bleak.

One thing that always seemed a constant in my life since I was fourteen was reading and writing. My nose would usually be in a book or magazine; though my reading was so slow that it would usually take me about three or four months to finish a novel. I still remember the first novel I finished reading from cover to cover was The Brothers War by Jeff Grubb. It was a fantasy novel based on the Magic: The Gathering universe that I used to be very into. After that I read a bunch of the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony, Question Quest being my favorite. I never read the books assigned to me in English class. To this day I still haven’t read Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, or anything to do with Shakespeare. Though, I do intend to read them at one point. Except Shakespeare, call me uneducated, but I have very little tolerance to read an old and obsolete version of English.

I never quite kept a journal, but I would on occasion write about the “problems” in my life in a word document or would write long-winded e-mails to a friend about what was on my mind. I also attribute AOL Instant Messenger(AIM) for my ability to write quickly. I was not one for phone calls really. I would usually start, develop, and keep my relationships with friends by talking on AIM. So over the course of time I became vastly more comfortable with the written word than the spoken.

It hit me that throughout my life I’ve been told that my writing was very good. I started to wonder if this was the thing that I had a talent for. I needed to explore this. In April of 2011 I made it a goal to keep a daily journal of at least 1000 words. It took me a few months to become consistent with it, sometimes missing four or five days in between entries. Even now, I don’t quite hit  the everyday mark. I’ll miss three or four days a month. I see myself steadily improving though. My streaks of not missing a day where I write 1000 words of usually gibberish and utterly unreadable dribble have increased. I started reading more and more into the subject of writing and doing the one thing that many aspiring writers simply fail to do; write! Write, write, and write some more is the advice I constantly I heard echoed. Seems simple enough. But write about what? Anything! Just write. I don’t feel like I am an expert in anything at the moment, so I started writing about that subject that I know best, myself.

I see this as the second phase of I-don’t-know-how-many-phases project of developing myself as a writer. Simply getting whatever I am writing out there for you, the reader, to criticize, destroy, and hopefully enjoy. Through this, I hope to see if I truly have a talent for writing. Like any talent worth a damn, it will take a long time to develop and blossom.

~Raul Felix