Hey yall! I've had some changes in followers, so I wanted to be sure you know what you're getting when you follow me!
My name is Abbie Smith. I am a thirty-something-year-old author who was born, raised, and lives in southern Louisiana. Ever since I was young, I knew I wanted to be a writer. For me, there was nothing I loved more than sitting down with a pen and notepad and writing stories. I never thought that I was good enough to come up with original ideas, though.
So when I started high school and discovered an AOL chat room for one of my favorite TV shows where people were writing as though they were the characters... I was hooked.
I spent a lot of years doing text based roleplay and making online friends. What started in AOL chat rooms eventually morphed into forum/message boards. At some point, I guess as I got older, the role playing wasn't as popular with my friends. I tried so hard to keep it going, but they weren't as interested--which happens, no shade at all.
Right after my co-author, Lauren, and I graduated high school, she hit me up on AIM (y'all, I know I'm aging myself, but whatever) to see what I was doing. I was mortified. How could someone in my real life ever understand what I spent hours of my time doing?
Instead of making fun of me, Lauren wanted to join in.
From there, we found that when writing together, we created interesting and fun plotlines. All of it was Harry Potter based roleplay. We created characters and even if others thought we were over the top, I got sucked into the stories, into the characters, in the worlds we created.
Throughout college, I would go through phases where I went back to roleplaying. After college, I decided that I wanted to give writing a good try. I still lacked the confidence in myself that I could write something original.
Writing has always been such a deep part of me. When I'm writing or working on my novel stuff, it never feels like work.
When I'm writing, nothing else matters. When I'm writing, I'm happy. When I'm writing, I'm whole.
Guns & Smoke is my first published novel, but I have so many in the works. Between my co-authored projects with Lauren, and my solo projects, I have enough ideas to fill many, many books and series. Sometimes, I wish I could go back and tell the younger me that you have plenty of ideas for good stories--you just need to believe in yourself enough to write them.
If you're a writer, it's normally because there's something inside of you that calls to you to do it. That's how it's always been for me. That's how it always will be.
Thanks for reading!
Abbie