Who Am I?
The Facts:
Name: Davita L. Freeman
Age: 26 Location: Colorado Occupation: Comm's Admin. Coordinator for a non-profit Education: BA - Social Science; MA - TESOL
Hobbies: Reading, writing, singing, piano, watching movies, and playing with my cat :)
Brief Bio:
I grew up in Northern California where the redwoods blot out the sky and the people are few and far between. My time was spent between a little town with my grandmother and school, in a neighboring town. I was unimaginably shy but had already started to create stories. I made up stories to act out for my playtime. I told silly stories to my sister when we had an earthquake. And even created stories using coloring books as the inspiration. I started writing things down around ten or eleven and at twelve I won a short story contest for a mystery I wrote. By fourteen, though, I stopped writing, or at least finishing. High school was difficult, especially as I had undiagnosed clinical depression. These years of struggle seemed to kill my desire to write, or at least my confidence to write.
However, after my summer trip (2004) to Beijing, China when I taught teachers how to teach English (like I knew what I was doing :p ) the spark seemed to flare up within me. I had an idea, an idea as different from my previous writings as could be. I wrote romance, mysteries, modern stories when I was young. But this idea was of an epic fantasy. I'd fallen in love with Tolkien's work around 2002 so I can see the root of the idea, but this idea followed me for the next two years until I finally finished a 130,000 word manuscript and had a professional edit it. Now I look back at this story and I realize how amateur it is, but what a fabulous learning tool (and I haven't disposed of it yet). This was it though. The fire consumed me and I needed to write. I needed to learn and I needed to find out if I could actually do this for a living. And that's what I'm doing now. I have taken nearly 2 dozen online workshops and read dozens of books on writing. I've tried writing with an outline and without an outline. I am in the process of trying just about everything. And this has led to a second compelted manuscript which is in the editing process. And a half dozen partially fleshed out ideas: some with outlines, some with scratches in a notebook, and some with a binder of worldbuilding.
And so, I have now left my three year position as an English teacher at Chinese universities and returned to the states to find out if I have what it takes. If I have the stamina, the backbone, and the creativity to move into a competitive field. You can join my journey on my writing blog and my transition journey on my diary.
Dream big!
