Wasted Paper (Before It Was 'Wasted Paper')

When I was very young--too young to realize that the earth is hurtling around the sun at 67 thousand miles an hour, or that ants don’t have souls—-I experienced an event that shifted the entire focus of my life. Ever since then, I can feel the universe singing to me that there is something wrong, that half the things I do are unnatural. I was not originally designed to think this way. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way.
As time passed, I began making my choices based on what had happened, and acting accordingly, and I found out very early on that I needed to make reasons for everything I do. I needed to give myself reasons to stay and reasons to laugh. I could only be angry over certain things for certain reasons, and I was never allowed to leave my little homemade perimeter.
I was twelve when I decided that I would become a writer. It wasn’t that I had any kind of talent—I couldn’t put a sentence together to save my life. I thought I was dyslexic. But I knew that eventually, once I hit the teenage years, that I would want to commit suicide. Even at that age, I could already feel my tendency toward it, the allure of death. But I needed to stay alive and for that, I needed a reason.
So writing has become my everything. It’s what I breathe, it’s what I think, it’s what I eat. I took a class on it when I was thirteen and learned that the best teacher on how to write was experience. I spent most of my free time researching websites and reading books and blogs by published authors—all about writing. My head was filled to the brink with anything I could learn about the written word: pronunciation, spelling, sentence structure, dialogue, world-building, character profiling.
When I was sixteen years old, I read a blog by one of my favorite authors, saying how much she enjoyed her writing group and how she thought it was an essential part of becoming a good writer to have one. Having a support group that doesn’t gripe at you for going on and on about a project you’re working on is an exhilarating experience and lets you grow in ways you wouldn’t have otherwise.
That was it. The challenge of finding a group of people who loved writing as much as I did grew up in my chest, but every time I thought about it, I’d get really sad, because I didn’t know anyone who would start it up with me. I had been a sweetheart and a little too apathetic for the few teenage peers that I had known, and anyway, I didn’t really know them very well.
A few weeks passed with this longing in my stomach, burning like an ulcer, when I found an email from Mom about this guy named Ted Remington, who worked over at Saint Francis University, and wanted to start up a writing group. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in joining.
I swear, there was this crazy moment when the clouds parted and I heard angels singing and the Voice of God saying “You bet your ass you’re going to sign up for this thing!!”
Okay, maybe that last part was me. But there was singing.
Our writing group began in the late September/early October time of the year, and I was introduced to some of the most influential people in my life. They were and still are ridiculously awesome and easy to get along with and I am still friends with all of them to this day, two and a half years later. The group has grown and morphed substantially during its lifetime, but I’m not sorry about any of it. In fact, I’m probably happier with it now then I was when it started (and I was ecstatic about it then).
So welcome to my circle.
If any of them read this, I hope they’ll find it at least a little entertaining. Most likely, they’ll think it’s hilarious.
For those of you who don’t know me or them well enough, this is my collection of observations throughout the last few years.

Let’s begin with Sensei. You remember, Ted Remington? He didn’t want us to call him teacher, since he didn’t really plan on teaching us anything, and “Mr. Remington” was too formal. He suggested Ted, but I couldn’t call him that. All I could think of was “Teddy Bear” which created a certain amount of awkwardness. I decided to call him Sensei (I’m obsessed with Japanese culture) and the name stuck.
He confessed to us early on that he had actually wanted to start this group in order to have an excuse to read his story to a bunch of kids on a weekly basis, and maybe get some criticism. So instead of this being a class, where we would sit and do what he tells us to, he wanted it to be more of a group focus thing. Something we’d all enjoy.
What was funny was that he’d been worried that he wouldn’t get any participation from us and that we’d all just get together and have nothing to read. He was afraid we wouldn’t put any effort into this. We were teenagers, after all. We responded to that by laughing at him and telling him that he had obviously never worked with Homeschoolers before. We worked very hard on our projects and loved our group sessions with a passion (I did, anyway).
Unfortunately, after a few months, the “class” had to end, and Saint Francis needed the room space back. You wouldn’t believe the dank, dark endless pit I could see looming in front of me at the concept of having to lay this experience to rest. Thankfully, they all felt pretty much the same way, so we decided to keep in touch by email and continue meeting in the local library with our stories.
But Sensei couldn’t keep going with us. He had to work on other classes that were starting up. I have no idea what he’s been doing lately, but as I write this I realize that I should probably try and meet with him again.

And then there’s me. I think I talk too much to the people in my writing group. I say a lot of crazy, weird things that I probably shouldn’t, just because I sometimes try a little too hard to keep their attentions. I have to sometimes pretend I know exactly what they’re talking about, but all I’m doing is smiling and nodding and saying “Ahhh” and “Oh, yeah” at the correct moments.
As previously stated, when we had to move out of the University, we went to the library. At first it was an all-together effort to send out emails about our schedules and work with each other to find a middle ground in which we could meet. This went on for a long period of time, before I began realizing that they weren’t sending those emails out to everyone, just to me.
Why they were only replying to me and not broadcasting it, I have no idea, but I began to broadcast it for them, and before I knew it, I was orchestrating which emails would get sent where—-who, how, and when.
Strangely enough, I never really realized what was happening until, one day when I was sitting at the computer, typing up and sending out emails to everyone about meetings and schedules. My older sister Grace came up behind me and asked what I was doing. When I told her, she chuckled and said "You know, it’s kind of like you’re the one running the whole group, like you’re their leader."
I laughed and continued writing the email. And then a second later, it hit me. "Aw, crap. It IS a bit like I’m running the show, isn’t it? They’re going to be so mad at me..."
But I figured they’d think it was funny, if nothing else, so I put that whole conversation in the email. One of them wrote back that I was now dubbed El Presidente, and I haven’t been able to live it down ever since.
But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the power play, just a little bit.

Valerie was only thirteen when we started—the youngest one. She is a quirky little fuzz ball, I’ll tell you what. She’s always giggling at something and she’ll just unexpectedly start talking on top of you, because she can’t wait to get it out of her head and see what you think. She’s pretty crazy and tends to say whatever comes to her lips first, but at the same time she holds so much of herself back. She has to, with everything she goes through on a daily basis.
Valerie always wanted to be an actress. She was in a young adult theater production program here in town, and was pretty good at it too. It was so entertaining, watching her up on stage, because she’s a bit twitchy but so adorable.
Poor Valerie, though. She has self-confidence issues and she doesn’t control where her thoughts lead her sometimes. And she doesn’t always think good thoughts. As a group, we all tried to give her our help and advice, but in the end, I don’t know if we did alright by her.
Her parents transferred her to a public school more than a year ago now, so she can’t attend the writing meetings anymore. I take classes over at her school, so I see her every now and then. We stop and chat for a while—-I look at her clothing style and laugh hard, she informs me that I still have a hole in my chest where my heart used to be, and am I ever going to get that looked at?—-before I shoo her away to her next class.
If any of you are wondering, I think she’s okay. She’s still pretty funny. Her eyes still shine. But she told me once that the soap thing is not working for her anymore.

Ria is one of those few people I judged too soon, before I really got to know her. I panned her out as being a romantic. I didn’t actually have a reason why, I just thought she looked like one of those girls. It was the shape of her face, the way her cheeks glow red when she laughs, and the way her short curly hair bounces ever-so-subtly. She always dresses in such warm outfits. Even when they’re not; they just LOOK warm on her.
If I were to ever draw her in a picture, she would be in the middle surrounded by huge, human-sized balls of yarn, pillows everywhere, maybe a few kittens, and a bunch of features. I DON’T KNOW WHY.
She’s actually pretty sharp and quick witted. Among all of us, she is always the first to give super good criticism. And she’s always right about the criticism.
I remember our first group meeting, I was super nervous and got stupid and I’d said something to impress them all, and it worked (they all laughed), but Ria came back at me with something so much better, without so much as blinking. I felt so stupid afterwards, but so in awe of her at the same time.
I don’t think I could ever see her angry. I can’t even imagine it. I’ve seen her focused before and confused before, but never annoyed or apprehensive. She exudes happiness and false cuddliness whenever I see her!
I say false cuddliness because she is actually not the cuddly, romantic type. She doesn’t like romance stories. She blushes profusely, all the way down to her fingertips, at the mention of kisses. I’m the one more likely to talk about romance than she is, and I am so not a romantic.
Sadly, she hasn’t been coming to a lot of our writing meetings lately, because we’ve been scheduling them at all the wrong times for her. Our personal schedules don’t collide very often and when they do, I try to get as many of us to get together as I can. But hopefully soon we’ll be seeing her more often.

Whenever I think of Eliyah, I think she’s probably the most practical of us all. She has this tendency to keep her voice level and remind us all to be quieter, since we meet in the library. Thank God for her! I’m sure we would’ve been kicked out a long time ago if not for her.
In the beginning, she hadn’t had any idea what this group was going to be about (really, none of us knew) so she had brought what she’d previously worked on when it came to writing: school work. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was an essay about a type of fossil, some sort of bug, and it had actually won an award.
So my first impression of her was that she had award-winning renown, she knew about prehistoric animals, and she was level-headed. Intimidation galore.
FFUUUAAAAHHH. That was the sound of my inferiority complex expanding.
Once we had subconsciously established ourselves as a story-and-poem-writing home school group, she decided to push herself in a new direction and write what she had never written before. She wanted to follow our lead and she now writes poems mostly, but is working on a few stories that we might get to hear whenever she quits rewriting them and just reads them to us!
It’s so great to hear her poems, because they’re so dark and morbid, and she’s so sweet and happy. She says she’s writes them at weird hours of the night, though, which I think explains everything, and insists that’s the only way she writes something she likes.
I wouldn’t know the difference, though, since I’m such a pushover, I love everything she reads.

Caitlin is the coolest person I know. Not the AWESOMEST person, mind you, not even my favorite person, but the *coolest*. She doesn’t so much as walk into a room as swagger towards wherever the couch is. When she sits, she slumps down and props her feet up on the coffee table. She’ll look at you and laugh with you one second and the next second she’ll stare at you like you’re the dullest person in the world to her.
If ever I had to pick which of my friends were destined to become a rock star, it would be Caitlin. I knew that about her when I first met her, even before she helped create and become one of my favorite bands of all time.
One of the funniest and most annoying things about Caitlin is that she knows how cool she is, but she always insists that she’s crap. She’ll go on and on about how terrible her writing is, or how monotonous her reading is, when she’s actually pretty good. I don’t know why she feels she has to bother, but every time we sit down to read our stuff and it’s her turn, she will, without fail, remind us that she is a terrible reader.
WE KNOW ALREADY, GET ON WITH IT!
I love her to bits, though. She’s one of the few people who are always like "We need to have a writing meeting. RIGHT NOW." She told me once that since I’m always the one scheduling the meetings, but she’s always the one *telling* me to schedule the meetings, that I was like Jesus and she was like God. I’m the one everybody sees, she’s the one in the background making things happen.
Boy, did I go off on that girl. We sat and argued (laughingly, of course—all in good fun) for about fifteen minutes over this concept. I’ll have you know, I schedule LOTS and LOTS of meetings without Caitlin’s help, thank you very much. I just happen to be busy quite a bit these days and I need some reminders, is all.
I don’t know exactly when it happened but I think I had known her about a year before she started up a band with one of her other friends (now one of my friends), called Kelly & Caitlin. They do gigs around town and are freaking amazing, and whenever they come up with a new song, they’ll sing it for us in writing group first, sort of as a test-run.

Angel is definitely not someone you forget once you’ve met them. She’s fast-paced and driven to succeed, almost to the point where sometimes I worry about her. She’s always the first person to volunteer for anything, even if it’s crazy, and if she sees you not volunteering, she WILL FORCE you to join her.
Overachiever is an understatement with her. She’s a fantastic writer, but she also wants to be a director. And an actress. And she likes to be behind the camera. Basically, she wants to someday make a one-woman film, starring herself. I would say she is a seriously braggart, except that she CAN do all of those things. And as creative as she is, the movie probably wouldn’t suck as much as it would if it were anybody else. I would spend eight and a half dollars at a theater just to see what Angel’s come up with, which is probably why I’ll go broke buying all her movies when they start coming out.
She mostly writes fan fiction, but not the stupid kind. I’ve always been wary about fan fictions, because once you finish, you can’t do anything with them. They have no bearing on the real world, but hers are better than that. She writes hers so far removed from the original story that it’s based on, that it seems like a completely different story. In the last year or so, she’s been working on several original worlds, but we all sort of like her older characters more.
That’s another point about Angel. She writes multiple stories simultaneously. She lives so far out in the middle of nowhere that in the time it takes her to get into town, she could have written five chapters in three separate stories on her laptop.
She always has something to say about whatever is being discussed, mainly because she knows half of everything in the universe. She’s a walking encyclopedia of weirdness. We could be talking about sea-lions and she would know something about them that we didn’t know. Apparently, Angel’s brain is ten percent larger than the average human’s.
I think one of the best things about Angel, though, for all her boisterous intelligence, is that she never seems to put up a front for anybody. When it comes to her appearance or her attitude, she never sways too far from her equilibrium for too long. God made me who I am, she would tell me, why should I need to hide it?
I’d never fault her for that thought process, but I can’t say I share it.
I am incredibly fond of her, I’ll admit it, even though we argue over everything. She likes orange and hates red. Red is my favorite color and nothing rhymes with orange. She listens to weird/dreamy/pop music, I listen to rock. It is pronounced "Bel-ee-AL" not "Bel-EYE-al".
Me: I KNOW THIS CRAP! I’VE DONE RESEARCH ON IT!
Angel: I’VE READ THE ENTIRE INTERNET!

And that’s about it for Wasted Paper’s original members. Tomorrow, I’ll work on the rest of the bunch and have it posted up soon. Hope you had fun. Sorry about the length.