I suppose this post is really a piggy-back type of post to this one I posted last week. I may make references to that post so if you become a bit clueless go and read that one first. It may fill in the blanks.
Receiving accolades for your writing at any age are addicting. Praise for anything is like that I think. It has nothing to do with age either. Just because it happens earlier in life it doesn't make it any less significant. I think in some cases it makes even more impact on someone's life. That's how I fell about my writing experience. While it wasn't a major award, just a classroom foil star sticker, it was the only one given out in class. It's hard not to be proud of something like that, right? Since that moment in third grade I've continued wanting to write and to become a writer. I've never stopped writing. While most of the time I write for myself, never really allowing others to read what I've written, I still write and keep my imagination working. As I've gotten older I've become a little more "open" with my writing. Only recently I've taken it a step further and posted a couple of chapters from my most recent work on Scribophile, an online critiquing community of writers. It's just another step towards eventually publishing a work.
I still want to become a writer though life has made move down my list of priorities by necessity. Having a husband, a child, a home, and work kind of does that to a person. I write because I love putting stories to paper. I'm not sure that my stories amount to much but I enjoy writing them and that's all that matters to me.