I guess today I'll talk about my Wattpad "origin story."  I first stumbled on here around the later half of 2013.  I think it's been around since 2006 or something, but I'd never heard of it until I decided to sign up.  Even then, I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into.

Mostly I just wanted to do something with my book Tourist Trap.  I'd finished writing it in 2004, and was trying to learn about how one went about trying to get published.  I attended a writer's conference in, I think, 2005 or 2006, and I just remember they were very adamant that it was a terrible idea to post your work online.  I think the reasoning for that was that traditional publishers wouldn't want to touch it if it had already been posted online first.

That may or may not still be the case.  Things have changed a lot in the intervening years.  But honestly, it didn't really matter to me.  By 2013, it had been 9 years since I finished my book and it didn't seem like traditional publishers wanted to touch it anyway.  More specifically I couldn't figure out how to get anyone to actually look at the dang thing.  

I had decided to go back to school from 2011-2013, and that kept me really busy.  I don't think I wrote anything at all during those years.  When I graduated in 2013, the job market was pretty bad so it took me a little while to find something.  In the meantime I had some free time on my hands and I figured I would see if I could figure out something to do with Tourist Trap, which felt like it was just gathering digital dust on my computer.  

Somehow I learned about Wattpad and I decided to give it a try.  I didn't know anything about the place or what it was about, I just saw you could post your stories on it and I figured why not give it a shot?  My username came from a nickname I had for my dog.  It didn't occur to me that some people might want to use their real names as usernames as a way to promote themselves or something, but that's okay.  I'm good with my username.

I started posting a few chapters of Tourist Trap and fairly quickly I got a few people reading and commenting on it.  That was enough encouragement to get me to post the whole thing.  Probably my single best Wattpad moment was when I was contacted by the admins and they said they'd like to make Tourist Trap a featured story.  I don't even know if they do that anymore of if it's the same as it was back then, but all of a sudden I got flooded with reads and comments.  It's amazing what even a tiny little bit of promotion will do.

The part that was both good and bad was I hadn't finished a sequel to Tourist Trap at that point.  I had started one, but after not being able to make any headway with book 1, I got discouraged and stopped.  I didn't see the point of expending the amount of effort it takes to write a book into writing a sequel to a book nobody had read.  But after getting featured I got a ton of comments from people asking me where book 2 was.  I felt bad I didn't have it ready to go, but it also gave me the motivation to actually finish book 2.  By the time I finished it, I think a lot of those people had moved on to other things and forgotten about my silly little book because I didn't get anywhere near the same amount of reads on it, but that's okay too.  I think I would have gotten a lot more if I'd had it ready while Tourist Trap was being actively featured, but it's great that I wrote the thing at all.  I really don't think I would have if I hadn't gotten onto Wattpad, so credit where credit is due.  I've definitely been writing a lot more in the past 9 years that I've been on here, and that's a good thing!