Aislinn Finn had never been much of a social butterfly. For the most part, she would rather have been at home than hanging out with her friends, even when she was very young. She wasn't particularly scholarly, but she was smart, and above everything, she loved to read.
Books drew her in, and even at a young age she had an exceptional reading level. She could read books earlier than most kids learned to read, and in second grade she was reading books that were normally for kids at least three to four grades ahead of her.
For Aislinn, it was her escape.
It wasn't really that life was so hard that she wanted to escape from it. She actually had a fairly comfortable childhood and she was well taken care of and she couldn't really complain about anything in that area. But escaping from it was what she loved to do.
There was something Aislinn found in books that she couldn't find anywhere else. It was the feeling of being accepted, a feeling of hope, a feeling of belonging. She was the characters, and they were here. She cried with them, she laughed with them, and the worlds came alive for her through reading.
It was her facination with the marvel that was books that probably drove Aislinn to write her own stories, even at a young age. It was also her facination with these books that gave her such an understanding of them that she was able to write stories with a decent amount of skill.
Writing was always something she'd thought about doing, but she never thought she was quite good enough to do it. There were so many out there, so many great writers and she had no idea how she could even compare herself to them. She didn't even think herself worthy to.
However, as Aislinn reached her high school years, there became a growing need within her to not just read about these fantastic worlds that people had created, she was feeling the need to have her own. So, in her freshman year of high school, she began to write again.
Her writing this time was different than before. When she had written as a child, she had written it to please others. She had written for others to read, rather than for herself to enjoy. This time, she wasn't planning on writing for anyone else. This time, she sat down to write, and when she wrote, the words just came out. She wrote what felt natural, rather than having to try and think of how to start, what to right, what to say. She wrote to please herself. She wrote because she wanted her own world to escape to. She wrote because it felt good. She wrote because it was fun. Her writing was for herself, it wasn't even meant to impress anyone.
The more she wrote, the more she wanted to write something for the world to see. She wanted to write something for her, she wanted to write something she enjoyed, yet, she wanted to share it with the world. So Aislinn Finn had made herself a promise in high school. She promised herself that she'd one day write something with an end to it.
Every time Aislinn wrote, she never managed to finish anything. She'd create something beautiful, then never know where to go with it, only to abandon the idea for a fresh one, a new story, a new world. So Aislinn's promise to herself was something she never thought she'd keep.
Yet staring at the words on the computer screen, Aislinn had only meant to write the end of the chapter. However, the more she stared at the screen, the more she realized the story had somehow ended itself. She had written the end to the story without realizing. There was no more to write.
It was finished.