Teenage Lexicon

The Eminence , without a doubt, is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I think it’s my best work to date technically, and its plot is probably the most solidified. I have a better grasp of my characters, and I have better and less trite vocabulary. But it isn’t just that. The Eminence was extracted straight out of my soul. The Knowers —maybe because it was my first piece of fiction I knew people would read—is kind of a watered-down Nina. But The Eminence isn’t. I don’t sugarcoat anything. I try not to shy away from awkwardness. I had a story and I told it and I tried not to put anything between me and my words. After reading some of it, my dad pointed out that The Eminence was a kind of therapy for me. Because the majority of it was written during my junior year and the summer following, a lot of the stuff I was dealing with comes out over the course of the book. I was in AP Chemistry, so you’ll see a lot of chemistry references. I was starting to love architecture, so yo...

November has just drawn to a close, and lots of brave, successful writers have taken the beginning of December as the time to share their projects started or completed through NaNoWriMo.  But why, do you ask, am I not one of them? 2017 was my first, and last, year participating in NaNoWriMo. In theory, it seemed like a great idea. I had only a few chapters of Knowers Book Two completed, and I wanted to get more of it done. It seemed like a good way to get in touch with other authors and advance my skills. I signed up for it on November 3rd because I kind of forgot November was a thing until then. It took about three more days for it to become the bane of my existence. I was a junior in high school in November 2017. For those of you who have completed junior year, you know that this wasn’t the time to try to write 50,000 words of a novel. I was also in a musical that opened second weekend of November, editor of my school’s literary magazine, and taking three AP clas...