my mentor is a fictional character

as i mentioned in my previous post, i have had to write a bio and here is the finished (well right now anyway) product:

I walked through the bright red door of my future when I was 16 and a junior in high school. That red door was the entrance to a white-walled classroom bustling with sounds from noisy teenagers, the electronic hum of a number of old-school Macintosh computers, and the twangy sounds of the local country station on the radio. We sat on table tops as opposed to chairs and were given free reign of the town during that glorious hour before lunch. We were the staff of the Demon Pitchfork, a 16 page, award-winning paper with full color front and back pages that we produced twice a month. There was reporting to be done, ads to sell, stories to write, and coke breaks to be had. Mind you, that would be the kind of coke you drink.

In my first year on staff I was a lowly staff writer and along with everyone, a copy editor. But, in my second year, my best friend and I were chosen to be the Opinion page editors. Oh, the joy! We could layout the page and write our very own column in every issue. It was groundbreaking stuff. One column in particular was about prom and how we knew everyone would remember it because police officers equipped with breathalyzers would be manning the doors.

That year the classroom walls began to take on new life as we began covering them with the front pages of the Demon Pitchfork, thus leaving our legacy. In my senior year, my friend and I must have won upwards of a dozen of those monthly awards for page layout and opinion column writing. But my greatest achievement that year, rivaling actually graduating, was my student Marshal-Gregory award in Single News Reporting for a story I wrote about the local grade schools with a whopping 13 sources. While the newspaper was fun it was time to be serious and something that fun I could not consider to be serious.

So, I moved on and I got a little lost in my first year of college. It took HBO’s series Sex and the City and it’s star character, Carrie Bradshaw to get me back on the right road. The summer after my freshman year, a college friend was instrumental in my addiction to the show. We would sit in her Mary Engelbreit decorated apartment in silence for those fabulous thirty minutes on Sunday nights. There were no phone calls and no interruptions and during that half hour our lives were intertwined with the lives of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha. When the credits rolled we’d make our way outside and light up a Marlboro light only to rehash the entire episode. We’d discuss the witty commentary, the fashion, the drama…everything. I had to know everything I could about this show and this writer, so I rented every single season. In between episodes I’d step outside to smoke and think. I began to dream of strutting into Vogue wearing four inch heels and a pencil skirt walking straight to my editor’s office to discuss my latest story. I am sad to say but Carrie Bradshaw was the first writer I had seen making writing fun, fashionable, and witty. I mean, I could see myself in her, she was addicted to shoes and so was I! I’m pretty sure this is when I began drinking Cosmopolitan’s as well. By the end of the summer, I had made up my mind and a change of major was in order.

That first semester as a Mass Communication major was a rocky one and after my first writing class I emerged with a bruised ego and a C. Even still, New York City and those glossy magazines were where I was headed and Carrie Bradshaw was there to inspire whenever I felt otherwise. I can recall one moment of weakness after a poor grade on a paper where I actually considered putting up my pen. Er…computer? I was standing in the office of one of the most frustrating professors I have ever known and close to tears. He gave me the normal speech about why teachers were hard on students, but he concluded by commenting about how driven and determined I was. I knew I was driven, but he noticed too.

I’ve driven down many roads since then. I was in Corporate America for a couple of years. There I learned that no matter how crazy the task may seem you still have to figure out how to do it, and probably within an hour. I had a stint in a Speech Pathology master’s program where I discovered that conducting a speech therapy session makes me physically ill. Ultimately, I have come back to journalism, my greatest love and my greatest fear. I’m a grad student at UNT this time, where I’ve learned that everything I ever thought I knew about writing is, well, crap.

So, here I am, young, headstrong, driven and ready to write. Thanks Carrie.