Member-only story
Social Media Doesn’t Suck
Why I truly and unapologetically love social media.
In the days of the adolescent internet…
Before social media, there wasn’t much to do on the internet.
Mostly I read fanfiction (Harry Potter and Twilight) and surfed communities like LiveJournal. There were also games, which got boring after about twenty minutes of playing (other than The Sims, of course).
So I signed up for a website called FictionPress.
I was probably twelve or thirteen, just beginning my journey into writing my first novel-length story, and I found a community on FictionPress and LiveJournal.
I found my writing people, some of whom were in college and were writing literary works that were way above my level. I didn’t pay any mind to that— I read it all voraciously, not caring that I didn’t quite understand the references to Hemingway or great crime novels.
They all supported me, reading my very early writing and encouraging me. I credit those communities for allowing me to grow as a writer and recognize my strengths (such as natural description) very early on.
Some of those people are still my friends — one of them, K, is my across-the-world best friend. We used to email back and forth…
