The rest of chapter 2 is up. Posted this a little later than I intended, but finally got the motivation to finish up the revision for now. I'm not quite satisfied with this, so I might change it around a bit in the future. May even rewrite the entire thing. So any feedback would be much appreciated.

You can read the rest under the asterisks near the center on this page: http://inkanddalliance.weebly.com/chapter-2.html

So this is the the start of my more recent work on MW that no one else has read yet. I wrote this last year (2009) after I received some encouraging feedback from a couple of my participants who are writers. I shared my story 'Phoenix' with them, which is a story about a girl returning home for the funeral of a boy she met too late in high school, and unsuspectingly finding a new relationship with one of her fellow attendees. One of my participants said it was beautiful, and another said with a smile that she thought writing was dead with people my age. So yeah, that made me pretty happy.

My only qualm with the whole experience is that I don't tend to write realistic fiction, which is all 'Phoenix' is. The same thing happened back at Bard. One of my writing professors seemed hesitant to praise one of my fantasy pieces simply because of its genre. I know there's a stigma in academia against fantasy writing, which I think deterred my writing for a while. Yet I always find myself settling back into fantasy whenever I write, so I decided to just run with it. I never know what I, or my readers, will get out of it. I hope it's proving to be some kind of inspiration or entertainment.

Anyway, this is part 1 of Chapter 2. I'll post up part 2 later next week. Read here http://inkanddalliance.weebly.com/chapter-2.html and leave comments if you can!

I wrote this during my sophomore-year writing workshop. It's gone through a few revisions since that time, as the main character has evolved.

Anyway, I don't want to ruin too much for anyone, but basically there are two separate narratives going on at the same time during this scene. I won't reveal anything more than that.

Read at http://inkanddalliance.weebly.com/chapter-1.html

A bit of explanation.

Merged Worlds is a novel I wrote between middle school and high school--I finished it my senior year. Or so I thought. I've always felt it to be my 'epic story', my baby if you will, and I knew it had more potential stored in it than was apparent in the poorly written chapters (although it is interesting to see my writing style change from beginning to end). So I've begun rewriting it, several times. Each time I'd place too much emphasis on it, trying to twist it into some kind of monolith that would change people's perceptions, or make them go 'wow'.

But that's rather silly of me.

So I'm no longer writing it with that intimidating standpoint. I'm going to write this story as I see fit for the sake of simply sharing it. If you find it inspirational in any way, well, then hot dog I feel special!