Hello and welcome gentlefriends. If you found my site it’s probably because you already know me and have seen me in the panicked throws of babyauthordom or I threw the link down in a shared message going “AHHH”. Firstly, thank you; secondly, I adore you; thirdly, thank you again.
But if you found me by some other chance – hi! Ignore all the sawdust and paint samples as I build this. My deepest thanks and genuine gratitude for you stopping by.
I’m Marissa Marinello and I’m an author.
As I started really digging into the whole attempts-at-published-author status, chatting with friends and loved ones about WIPs and submissions, having to figure out how to market myself (which, ew, hate, double hate, loathe entirely), I figured I should actually, you know, do something.
So for my first blog post I decided to go with – why do I write?
Easiest and funniest answer: I blame my parents.
I should note, I adore my parents. I’m incredibly lucky to have the relationship with them I do. They are loving, wonderful, encouraging people. It also means I get to cheekily “blame them” for being the way I am.
I grew up in homes that always had books. My parents would buy me any book I wanted, until they realized how financially dangerous that was becoming, then it was “ok, we’ll pay for half”, which lasted about two years and became “you have an allowance, you need to spend it wisely.” One of my mother’s favorite stories about tiny-Marissa is when asked to select a book for bedtime, I would take every single book off my bookshelf, put them in a circle around me, and select one (leaving my poor mother to put them all back). I was, sometimes literally, surrounded by books growing up.
I also grew up an only child without many kids in my neighborhood my age, so often the only people I had to talk to were the characters I made up to play with. Then I’d go to school and get to talk to my friends or visit family and get to talk to the adults. My grandmother called me “loquacious”, one of my best friends in middle school said I was “a storyteller”, my spouse tells me “I love to hear you talk.” Supposedly this skill made me an individual that makes acquaintances and friends easily. Maybe it translates into “I love to yap with people about stuff I like.”
Basically, I don’t know how to shut up, I love storytelling, and I discovered that combining the two was really fun.
I can remember the exact moment the sparks when off in my brain, discovering that writing was fun. I was on a school bus, stuck in typical LA traffic, on our way back from a field trip. One of my best friends was sitting beside me, pulled out a notebook and a pen, and said, “Want to write?”
“Write what?” I asked, deeply confused.
“Anything we want. A story.”
Oh sweet summer child, you did not know then what monster you created.
She does now, actually. Just saw her recently, telling her about my first submitted piece and its subject matter, to which she laughed and said, “of course you did.”
This is all a terribly roundabout way of saying – I write because it’s fun. I write because I love building worlds and lore. I write because I grew up loving stories and thought, “Man I wanna do that to.” I want something I wrote to be the reason a kid goes “this is so cool” or picks up a stick pretending its a sword or asks to be an obscure book character for Halloween.
