Hello, my name is Marla.

I've never written a blog before, I've always wanted one, but I've never really had a reason or any clue of what I would write about. I've always love writing and english class, it always seemed to come kind of naturally to me. I wouldn't say though that I was always passionate about writing. Throughout the past year I've had a lot of medical problems, I've been in a lot of physical pain, and at first I didn't really have a way to express what I was feeling. The begining of this year, my junior year in high school I took a creative writing class, the first section we did was poetry. I though it would be so hard, and I wouldn't be able to write anything good. I suprised myself though, because the first poem I wrote was really good, and it was so effortless. I wrote it in litteraly 5 minutes, and eventually I was chosen to be published in A Celebration of Poets, Illinois grades 4-12, Fall 2010. The poem is titles wrong, which really pissed me off, but, hey, I'm a published author at 17 and that's pretty damn awesome if I do say so myself. Eventually my medical issues got really bad and I've been homebound since September of 2010, but I continued to write all the time. While I was out I got an e-mail from my creative writing teacher, and he wanted a copy of my personal essay I wrote for class so he could enter it into the literary festival. Of course I was thrilled to give it to him, but to be honest I didn't think I wouldwin anything or even place. A few weeks later my councelor told me my story got 1st place in the Southwest Prarie Confrence Literary Festival 2011. I was so speachles. My story was about what I went through with my knee surgery that I had at the end of my sophomore year, it was 6 pages, and I was completly honest with everything when I wrote it. I never thought that people would like reading about all of that, but obviously they did. I was really scared weather people would like what they were reading when I started to post some of my poems as notes on Facebook and since people have had such good things to say about my poems and how much they liked them I wanted to be able to share them with more people. I write to help myself deal with things, and get through things and I've learned that I don't need to worry whether people like what I write or not, of course I'd like that they like it, but I don't stress about it anymore. I write for me and that's all I need.