The last person I expected to be inspired by as an awkward, gangly teenage boy was a fiery redhead from the nineties. Of course, there's a logical explanation for this: when I was growing up, I had few role models. I didn't respect my parents, or worship the judges on American Idol, or become one of Lady Gaga's Little Monsters. When I had issues in my life, there was no one I could turn to but myself. However, that changed one day when I ducked inside a thrift shop. There, I decided to blow five dollars on what would become one of the most important purchases in my life: Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes.

Her music spoke to me in ways no person in my life could. Each of the hundred or so times I fought with my parents, she could sing to me about how I still had a voice that's just been silent all these years. When my boyfriend broke up with me, she'd remind me as I cried into my pillow that that was just another little earthquake in my life. Hours of replays and many, many high school crises later, she became my go-to therapist for all my problems.

Over time, I became intrigued as to the identity of this angst-ridden, caterwauling lady from the other side of the speakers. I read her interviews. I read her autobiography. I watched the YouTube videos of her decrying Britney Spears' "Toxic" for being about Toxic Shock Syndrome. I fell in love, in a completely non-heterosexual sense, with this woman. She was as crazy, incomprehensible, scatter-brained as me, and yet she managed to have a life that seemed pretty good. So, like a good impressionable teen that does whatever his celebrity idols do, I decided to copy her.

She was a singer-songwriter, so I decided to start writing songs (my singing career was decidedly short-lived, on the pleas of my parents). Within three months, I had written fifty. Looking back, they weren't exactly the work of a young Fiona Apple-I used the phrase "for serious" more times than I would like to remember-but they were the beginning of what was to become one of my passions as I neared the end of my high school career. Writing songs led to writing fiction, and before I knew it, I was writing a novel (and finishing it) during November.

All the time I was writing, I listened to Tori Amos for inspiration. Each of her songs told of a struggle in my own life, which I could mine for creative energy. Just as often, she was taking the place of a parent at my bedside, telling me plain truths as I thought about the day's latest disasters. Throughout it all, she was the person I wanted to be: a woman who fought her demons, won, and then set them to work paying their rent.