A Writing Journey - 35 Years and Ongoing
Here's to More Writing!
Hi Storytellers! A. E. here.
I turned 35 years old on October 7, 2025 and that’s made me want to look back over how far I’ve come to get to where I am now. I’ve gone through a lot as my writer’s journey has spanned three decades since I started writing around 5 years old. This one is kind of long, and has a lot of images in it, but come along and experience this journey with me.
I’ve been a writer since 1995.
When I was kid, my imagination was fearless, unending, wouldn’t quit, could never quit. As long as I was reading, my mind thought “but what if this happened instead?” and there I was, off writing my own story. My mind churned out stories and my hands could barely keep up. I wrote so fast that my handwriting became so sloppy my stories were unreadable. My handwriting today is still pretty illegible, though I am practicing my legibility for the sake of my comic writing.
I wrote and illustrated three children’s books as a child. Only two survived to modern day, and I’ve shared them with you below.
Writing books since I was a kid came about because of reading. In order to write you need to read, and I was reading constantly. My mother is a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by books in libraries where I used to spend a lot of my time, and we had books at home. Then I picked up the pencil to start telling my own stories, even though I hadn’t totally learned how to spell yet.
I also wrote comic strips as a child. I love drawing, I loved writing, so why not put them together?
My comics featured animal characters learning moral lessons, because I loved Aseop’s Fables, and I loved fairytales and stories with animal characters.
I was inspired to draw by reading the New York Times Sunday funnies. My biggest inspiration in comics was The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder, namely Huey Freeman. I still try to draw him regularly to see if my art skills are getting any better.
So what was I reading while I growing up? Well, in the 90s and very early 2000s, I rarely to never read books by black authors. I actually only remember seeing Little Bill and The Snowy Day as a black character on the shelves when I was a kid. The kidlit books I read were Harry Potter, Charlie Bone, Artemis Fowl, Animorphs, Goosebumps and Spooksville and The Magic Treehouse series.
My main genre I read growing up was romance. Historical romance, paranormal romance, romantic suspense, as long as the genre had the word “romance” in it then I was reading it.
Harlequins.
If I was reading anything, it was going to be a Harlequin.
“The Greek’s Forbidden Mistress” or “Captured by the Sheik” or “His Secret Wife.” If that was the title, I was reading it. I was literally like 8, 10, 11, years old, reading this stuff. I couldn’t get enough.
Yet at the same time, I didn’t write romance despite that being a good majority of what I read. I tried my hand at it once, I wrote a story called “The Business Man’s Secretary” and didn’t really like it. Romance wasn’t for me to write, though I loved to read it.
Instead, between 5 and 13, I mainly wrote about animals like horses, wolves, cats and dogs that could talk and go on adventures, because I read and loved Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, The Black Stallion by Walter Farley, White Fang by Jack London and A Dog’s Life: The Autobiography of a Stray by Ann. M. Martin.
I also wrote about werewolves and teenagers with magic powers, because I read the Anita Blake series (my mom forbid me to read it since I was like 10 years old and I just snuck in her room and read it anyway.)
I also wrote about dragons, unicorns and centaurs but none survived far as I can tell. Maybe they’re on a floppy disc somewhere.
Anyway. Between 14 to 18, I had totally abandoned writing about animals and was full into fantasy, despite mainly reading romance.
I still have not read Lord of the Rings (love the movies.) I did listen to half of The Hobbit on audio book. I haven’t read any famous fantasy novels like the Game of Thrones (nor watched the show.) I didn’t read Wheels of Time series or Discworld.
I only read romance and only writing fantasy.
My work now featured necromancy, shapeshifters, and vampires. And then I discovered world-building. I began to craft cultures and religions and naming traditions and new races. I did this naturally out of shear love of storytelling and needing more stories, and loving creation, loving worlds, loving writing.
At the point of writing these stories N. K. Jemisin and Tomi Ayedemi weren’t a thing yet, and I hadn’t heard of Toni Morrison or Octavia Butler. I had no influence by black authors, and I am still mainly reading romance, not fantasy.
So how am I writing stories about magic and wizards and ancient cultures?
Well…because the romances I read now had these elements. Harlequins at this point have mostly been left behind though I still own about 300 of them, no lie. I was deep into paranormal romance. I was reading The Carpathian series by Christine Feehan. I read everything by Angela Knight and she writes with supernatural characters all the time. I read Emma Holly, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Susan Krinard and Kelley Armstrong. Without reading fantasy novels, I was getting plenty of the genre within romance. Even Linda Howard did a few books with reincarnated couples and psychic main characters.
It actually wasn’t until I decided to seriously work on publishing a novel, did I realize all my current work was all fantasy and sci-fi despite not reading in that specific genre.
That’s the same time I went to college to pursue an English Degree and a creative writing minor. I wanted to learn how to “officially” write because by my early twenties I hadn’t yet taken a creative writing class.
Everything I wrote was instinctive, self-taught.
And I haven’t even mentioned fan-fiction. Let’s not go there.
So age 23, I’m accepted to the University of West Georgia in August of 2013, all wide-eyed and breathless, eager to learn to write and maybe get taught how to publish a novel.
At UWG I came face to face with creative writing professors who thought only literary fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction were “real” writing and everything else is trash. Hearing what I write is trash began to turn into “I’m trash” and nuked my self-confidence in myself, and my writing. I’ll definitely talk about this in another essay.
I’ll never forget going into workshop and having my piece flung on the floor by the professor and called trash.
That “trash” is my debut novel, now available on Amazon for purchase and I’m working on getting the title transferred to IngramSpark so it can be available elsewhere.
I started a writing blog in 2018 to start detailing my writing journey, and you can find my official author page here. If UWG creative writing department did anything for me besides destroying my confidence as a writer, I had finally been introduced to Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, N.K. Jemisin, Tomi Ayedemi, Walter Mosley, Nichelle Nichols, Nalo Hopkinson, Justina Ireland, Karen Lord, Nisi Shawl, Samuel R. Delany, Ishmael Reed among others. I had learned that there were black authors with black characters to read and aspire too.
After graduating from UWG in 2019, and now having self-published my first novel, I took a break from my school, needing to nurse my wounds. I spent time trying to market The Other Side, and build my online presence.
I started my Facebook author page at aecostellowrites and tried to grow it, and attempted Twitter. Both were pretty disastrous as I had no idea as how to do social media or marketing. I did some in person events, and held tables in Chicago and in Georgia. Those are successful when I hold them but I fade away once I’m back home.
After a few years break, I was ready to go back to school. As I was researching grad programs, I felt like I was getting a lot of information that MFAs were expensive and people online kept saying you didn’t need the degree. I also knew how to write already, and didn’t really want to be told what to write.
But still, I love school and I love learning, and I really needed a writing community, and there was a lot more pros to MFAs then there was cons. I was tired of the self-taught avenue and tired of writing alone. I wanted to be surrounded by writers who also love writing and would accept me, unlike how I had been shunned at UWG.
I applied to Emerson College, and got rejected. That burned my confidence in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The sensation that I simply wasn’t good enough made me feel so small, insignificant, unworthy, I think it put me in a state of shock.
With my mother’s help, I joined a few classes at Grub Street and began writing again, and re-gained my confidence. Then with my Aunt’s mentoring, I applied to a second school, Goddard College (rip). I got in.
I was so happy! I felt like I had come home. I attended residency online and felt the flames of the burning school through the screen. I only spent a semester there before hopping off that sinking ship, and the school closed after I left.
After Goddard, I had to make a choice. Did I want to go for another grad program in writing, or pursue my other love in life, art? I had realized that I was letting my drawing skills slip away, and that I really missed drawing comics. So I began to research programs again, and I discovered Lesley University, which seemed perfect.
I applied to two different tracks there, the Writing For Young People track and the Graphic Novels and Comics track. I was accepted to both but had to choose one. I decided on Graphic Novels and Comics. I wanted to learn how to do something I didn’t know how to do, and that was comics. I had drawn them when I was a kid, but I hadn’t done them since, and had forgotten how.
So in Summer 2023 I joined Lesley University, and I again felt like I was home. It didn’t last. I wrote about my experience at Lesley in my post The Not So Better Lesley.
And I did over time finally learn how to draw comics!
That was the goal and I am very satisfied with the time I spent at Lesley. I am sad I won’t graduate from this program, the reasons why I’ve already talked about.
My writing journey is in someways only just getting started. Like here on Substack. I created Tell Your Story in 2024 and was too afraid to post on it, didn’t know how to start. It took me 9 months before I finally did my first post. And it took months after that to finally post short fiction. I hope to start serializing fiction here too.
And now, after all of this, my next steps in my writing journey is to maybe join another MFA program (Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing I’m looking at you,) post consistently on Substack with articles and short stories, finish a novel in 2025, and keep writing, writing, writing.
That’s my writing journey for the past three decades, and that’s the path forward I want to keep journeying forward.
What about you, Storyteller? What do you see when you look back on your journey, whatever it may be, musician, artist, graphic designer, novelist? How did you become a writer? A race car driver? A poet? A nurse or doctor or singer?
I’ll end on this. I’ve seen it around before but don’t know where so I’ll share it here:
Forget about the past, you can’t change it. Forget about the future, you can’t predict it. What matters is what lays before you. Reach out and grasp it.
You’ve got this.
Don’t let anyone tell you that You Can’t. Because You Can!
Seriously. YOU CAN. I CAN. And we will. I hope you stuck around to the end. You might find the motivation and inspiration you need to keep going. Don’t worry too much.
Just keep going.
Until next time, Storytellers,
A. E.