About Me

Yes, this is Austin. No, he can't come to the phone right now. He's busy writing, loving what he writes, then reading it, hating it, and editing it over again. 

Wait, did I say "editing?" I'm afraid I made a mistake. What I meant was "agony." 

Anyway, I'm glad you stumbled across my profile (or maybe you deliberately looked for it - neither one is very likely). Just between you and me... I'm not so sure what a "blog" is, but I think it's where I just ramble about things relevant to me and post them... right? Maybe one day it will matter to others, but for now, it's okay if it only matters to me. I've needed a blog for some time. Fish gotta swim, bird's gotta fly, writer's gotta write.

What? I hear you question yourself. He's a writer? Yes I am. No, not a formally published writer - not yet. But I'll get there. A key to life is to always have faith, but an even more important key is to act on that faith. Take those risks. Keep trying. Don't give up.

 

To segue into who this mister Austin Schreiber is, you must first learn a bit about my personal story about being a writer, or an "artist" in general, if you accept such a term of description. The first *actual* thing I really wrote was a little story called The Sphinx's Secret. It was about two siblings that traveled to Egypt and discovered a tomb buried beneath the Sphinx. 

It was awful.

But that's what you produce when you're in fifth grade. Awfulness. Everything you do is bad, and don't let anyone tell you different. But don't let anyone stop you from doing those things either. Because you have to be bad to get better. You have to do something and take risks to get somewhere at all, and the younger you start, the quicker you learn. 

So that's what I did. I kept writing, and I discovered just how much I loved it. I loved listing things. I loved thinking up ideas and writing them down. I loved building history and creating characters. I loved taking notes on what I liked and didn't like about something I was watching, or reading. Over time, those notes turned into reviews and essays that I was writing for my own personal enjoyment, an absolute rarity in youth these days (or ever, really). 

For my eighth grade project, I wrote my first book, a middle-grade adventure called The Invisible Room. It told the story of a young boy that discovers how his late father had invented a telescope that could allow people to perceive new colors with the naked eye (while I continued the story into another two and a half 10,000 word "books," they've since been sitting on my desktop, collecting digital dust. Not everything is a million dollar idea). By sophomore year I had written more than sixty reviews and essays, and started a novel I called Glow. I also started three comic book ideas, The Star Keys, The Five Kingdoms, and Splint Heart.

But they never went anywhere. All my artists walked out on me. I lost the drive to write. In fact, the only reason there's three of them is because I made something new every time an artist dropped a project.

But, in the late spring of my junior year, I had a spark of overwhelming inspiration. After rushing to my room on May 26th, 2016, I started my very first researched, formatted, and truly finished novel manuscript: Over the Dust and Snow.

It was the first real time I put wholehearted effort into learning how to plan, write, and edit an actual manuscript. And guess what? I loved it so much that I decided I wouldn't let anything stop me. That I would get somewhere with it. My success (relative success, that is) with it has even inspired me to take one of my old comic projects and turn it into a novel as well! To this day, I continue writing, and if I'm lucky, the words I spew will be in print, bound between two covers, and sitting on bookstore shelves. One step at a time, though.  

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this! I wish you luck and courage in your own endeavors. Lord knows I need them in mine.