As I recall, it all began when my younger sister walked into the bedroom that we share and said, “You know what? You should start a blog.”

It was the summer of 2012, I had just completed my second year of college, and I had a good deal of free time to spend. Although I don’t remember exactly what I was doing that moment when she walked in, I was probably either playing around on my laptop or reading a book. I do those things a lot.

I looked at her and asked, “What would I write a blog about?”

“You could write it about reading the 1001 books,” she replied.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a book edited by Peter Boxall, which compiles a list of 1001 of the greatest and most influential books ever written. The title itself offers the challenge at hand: can you read them all? I had discovered this book thanks to a website called LibraryThing, which acts as an online catalog for your personal library as well as providing a number of clubs and discussion boards in which members group around common interests and hold conversations. I joined the site after reading an article about it in Writer’s Digest magazine, and I found the club dedicated to reading the 1001 books while I was exploring it one day.

This was back in 2010, just after I had started attending college. I had already declared my writing major, and I was intent on doing everything possible to hone my skills. I’ve also had an intense love of reading since the time I first learned how. I wanted to take that challenge. Fresh from my days of reading nothing but Young Adult literature, I was eager to cut my teeth on the greatest books the world had to offer. I wanted to read them, and I wanted to read them all. Challenge accepted!

By 2012, I had already posted brief reviews of forty-eight books, from Life of Pi to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. As I walked the aisles of the contact lens distribution center where I had a part time job, I found myself considering the conversation I’d had with my sister the previous day. At the time, I had been skeptical, but in between fetching the proper prescriptions of Oasys for Astigmatism and ensuring that the contents of my little cardboard box matched the products called for on the invoice, I began to think that it might be fun to do a blog. Reading, writing, and computers, three of my favorite things brought together into a fun hobby. And so it began.

I wrote a post discussing what the blog would be about, two posts providing an overview of my 1001 journey up to that point, and a review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a lesser known work by Philip K. Dick, which, in my opinion, was perfectly deserving of its relative obscurity. I added new posts nearly every day during the month of August, but gradually posted less and less frequently as the demands of college caught up with me again. The demands of college often do.

I was, however, still putting enough time into it that I found myself wishing that I had a few more readers. To be honest, it usually felt as though no one at all was reading it, and, while that was to be expected at first, it became more and more discouraging as months passed.

I came home again at the end of the semester and said, “Caitlin! You should be following my blog!”

It seemed a reasonable request to make of someone who had suggested that I start one in the first place.

“Ok,” she said. “I’ll follow your blog if you get an account on Wattpad and fan me.”

And I replied, “Well, what’s Wattpad?”

She told me, and I was struck with inspiration. During my freshman year of college, I had been hiding out underneath the lofted bed in my four-person dorm room, playing Pokémon Fire Red. Because that’s just the sort of thing I did with my free time. I know, how awesome am I, right? I’d spent the last hour or so spinning my character in circles inside the Safari Zone and running away from nearly every wild Pokémon I encountered because I had been trying to catch a Chansey. I wanted a Lucky Egg so that my Pokémon could gain experience points more quickly, but the chances of even finding a Chansey that happens to be holding a Lucky Egg, much less catching it, are so low it’s ridiculous. And yet I’m just the sort of person who keeps trying anyway.

So I spent a long time on this, and, after a while, the monotony caused my mind to wander. I began imagining what the Safari Zone would look like if it was real, what this character would be thinking right now if she was capable of complex thought, and what plausible back story would have led her into this situation. And I got so excited about the ideas I was having that I put the game away, pulled out my laptop, and started writing about it.

I really liked what I had come up with, but I didn’t see anything I could practically do with it. It was fun to write, but it wouldn’t exactly fly in my Creative Writing class, I thought. I had “real” writing to get done: class work, a fantasy novel in progress, ideas for all the works that I hoped to be able to publish in the traditional market one day when I was finally good enough. When inspiration strikes, you write, but it’s not always worth anything except practice. I saved the file, closed the window, and moved on to all those other more important things.

But when Caitlin mentioned the idea of Wattpad, I remembered that little piece of writing. Why not? I thought. I’ll try publishing it online. I’ll read Caitlin’s One Direction fanfic, and I’ll turn this into chapter one of a story she can read for fun.

Her username was Caitlin_Payne back then. I selected d_s_t_e, a modified version of the username I had been using on LibraryThing and on my blog and basically everywhere on the internet where I needed one. I like consistency.

Oh, look, I thought. I’m a bridge! I always wanted to be a bridge! Totally joking, of course, but, since that's still my profile picture almost two years later, I obviously don’t hate it. Really, I just haven’t been able to come up with anything better to use. I’m a little weird when it comes to profile pictures. First of all, I want one that actually belongs to me, ideally one taken or created by myself. I also want something that somehow represents who I am. And... I don't take very many photos and I'm really terrible at visual art. I could use, say, a picture of my face, as my sister has pointed out, but I enjoy my relative anonymity far too much. Besides, everyone who knows me on this site is used to seeing the little bridge, right? Consistency!

By the time I started publishing, I already had a small stack of chapters prepared, so I decided I could handle a weekly updating schedule. I didn’t always succeed, especially when my courses were taking up too much of my time, but for a while I was trying to build up the habit of writing something every single day. Often my fan fiction would be the easiest thing to spend a little time on.

I also started reading on Wattpad fairly quickly. I started with my sister’s One Direction fanfic, of course, and I also started reading Take Me As I Am based on her recommendation. I looked through the various What’s Hot lists, but got very quickly discouraged with the content that I found there. I tried reading the first chapters of lots of different books only to find that they weren’t really what I was looking for. I wondered why it wasn’t easier to find good quality books on Wattpad, and that was the major motivation for starting my own book of reviews. Later on, I realized that what I really wanted to do was help other writers become better, so my reviews began to take on an additional angle of constructive criticism and I started a book of writing tips. My goal is to help make Wattpad better in my own little way, whether by giving recommendations to readers, helping writers, or just being friendly and supportive!

I’d read a few other Pokémon fan fictions after first joining the site, but I really got into them after joining the Pokémon Watty Awards. At first, I looked in the list of those entered in the awards and picked out the ones that looked most interesting, but when I found out that the awards would be based on votes, I decided that it would be only fair for me to read all of the books in a category before I voted for any of them. So as soon as I knew which ones were definitely complete by the deadline, I added absolutely everything to my reading list and went on a huge spree. I think I got a lot of readers of my own in a similar way, and it made me feel a lot more connected to the Pokémon fan fiction community here. I’ve met a lot of great fanfic writers and filled my reading list with interesting, funny, and original books.

After completing my first book, Getting Out of Fuchsia, I decided to try doing NaNoWriMo on Wattpad. I’d tried NaNoWriMo the previous year as well, so I knew that it was going to be terrible and that I would most likely fail miserably, so I just tried to have fun with it. I took a break for a while after that before starting on my fan fiction sequel The Girl with the Chikorita, which I am still writing now. I was so thrilled when it finally topped 10,000 reads a couple months ago! That’s been one of my goals on Wattpad for nearly forever, so I’m really happy that I finally got there.

And now RiverIvy and Skarmory_Rider have nominated me for this challenge and convinced me to write all this stuff about myself. Well, I hope you enjoyed it! I nominate my sister, eleventhfangirl (even though I know she’s already been nominated once :P), Vespin, Scarlet_Regnar, PikaChick, and Gatubellina (had to have one person on my list who doesn’t write Pokémon!). Consider yourselves challenged!