Welcome to My Blog

My name is Alexis Ryder, and I’ve been a closeted writer for the past 22 years.

My first attempt at writing was in 1st grade. I wrote a short story about a boy named Ricky (named after Ricky Martin) for school. My teacher loved it. My parents, the get rich quick type, instantly tried to capitalize on my newfound talent. They brought home, “How to Publish Children’s Books,” books, but quickly lost interest when I wasn’t receptive to the idea. Even back then, the thought of someone reading my stories terrified me. I continued to write stories about Ricky, and other characters, privately, for a longtime thereafter.

I was about 9 when my mom bought me my first journal on a family trip to Washington. That was when I entered the world of journaling. Before then, it had never occurred to me that I didn’t have to write fiction. I could write about my favourite topic, myself. I could take those thoughts that I was too scared to tell people out loud and write about them on paper. I had a place to document my private thoughts, which nobody ever had to read. It was cool.

In high school, I discovered the website, LiveJournal. It spoke to the database lover inside of me. It was an organized space to take all of my private thoughts and combine them into one uniformed location online. To date, I have a personal goal to type up and amalgamate all of my journal entries, right back to the very first one from Washington. I’m about 20 years behind, though.

While these days, journaling and tweeting take up most of my writing time, I’ve never lost my love of writing fiction. The fiction I write now is always loosely based on personal experience; the stories ruminating in the back of my head often manifest into short lighthearted fiction entries. I have another personal goal of combining them into a bildungsroman novel about a naive girl growing up in Southern Ontario, but I doubt anyone would actually want to read that. I’m not really that interesting.

And alas, that’s how I wound up starting this blog. I’m finally going to post those short stories about nothing. Maybe someone will find them interesting. It might be cathartic to let people in.

Happy Reading!