Hi, I'm Cloey van Zyl:) that's Cloey pronounced like Chloe if you were wondering...

I live in South Africa(the best place in the world, if you've been here you'll know what I'm talking about) and I’ve been writing short stories for many years.

When I was about twelve, I started out by writing stories with my best friend because we both loved the same type of books and figured we could write just as well as the authors of the romance novels that we read. We wrote a couple of heavily clichéd, silly love stories where the girl was always perfect and the guy fell in love WAY too quickly to be realistic. After a few years, we stopped writing stories because we just “got over it”, as one does quickly when you’re in grade 8. However silly our stories were though, the creative-process of the whole thing was actually really awesome and it sparked something in me to keep writing by myself.

So I did… my first story was about two spies who, after having a fall out seven years previously, get forced into working together once more… It was right after I had watched The Da Vinci Code for the first time so it was all about sneaking around underneath West Minister Abbey looking for a lost book. I never finished it because I got stuck and got over it. After that, I got very frustrated because I wanted to finish it but I had my first ever writer’s block and it sucked.

For a while(two years) I didn’t write anything and it wasn’t until I was struck by an idea that I finally got over my irrational fear and sat down to write. I forced myself to not start any other stories before I finished that one and finally I did it. It was pretty cool to be looking at my first finished piece of writing.

Since then, I’ve started many other stories but still haven’t gotten round to finishing them… Then I got the idea to write fanfiction, though at that point I had no idea that it was fanfiction or that other people wrote and read it too… For a long time, it was in my computer gathering dust because it never got finished due to more writer’s block and pure laziness.

Then, last year I watched and loved glee and first heard the term “fanfiction” mentioned. I looked it up on google and soon came across Fanfiction. net . It was AMAZING to find other people who loved to write fanfiction! I mainly read Glee Fanfiction but it wasn’t until after reading the very famous Glee fanfiction ‘Dalton’ by CP Coulter that I cautiously sat down and wrote a short one-shot based on CP Coulter’s masterpiece. The feeling of finishing another story renewed my excitement and I started to write and publish fanfictions on FF.n . I knew about FictionPress for a while but didn’t want to publish anything on here because I never thought my stories were very good…And I only have one original story that’s finished….

I’m probably not as good as most other authors on here but writing and stories are some of my greatest loves in life. I’ve always only written for myself so I’m still rather shy about my writing but I’m getting better. Anyway, I have a lot of good ideas and inspiration and by writing more, I’ll be growing as a writer and maybe even finish one of my other original stories.

For now though, check out my stories, leave a review, PM me or check out some of my fanfictions on ff.n if you like Glee or Harry Potter.

-Cloey van Zyl :)

PS: Sorry for the essay about my life… I just like to write…