Obviously this all gets tricky/complicated when your writing reveals so much of your private/intimate life, and the nature of writing on the Internet comes with a lot of focus on your "personal brand."

I used LiveJournal frequently, almost daily, since ~age 13 until ~18. I kept a personal diary there. I also participated in various "LiveJournal communities". At the risk of sounding patronizing or something, I see LiveJournal and now Tumblr as wonderful because they give young girls ways to interact with eachother and learn and talk about new interests, ideas etc as well as support eachother emotionally.

I admire Joyce Maynard a lot, specifically her memoir "At Home in the World." Her writing is beautiful and fascinating and seemed to give me validation to the idea that I could write validly in earnest about my life with (my) very feminine point of view, and also that I could unapologetically explore the bad traits of my character (which I find to be more interesting to explore than the good traits), as well as explore other concepts that interest me like private vs public personas, age gap relationships, etc.

I first emailed Tao Lin a story I wrote about the experience of losing my virginity sometime in April 2011. He didn't respond until it was later published on Thought Catalog, after which he sent me an email that said something very similar to, "I enjoyed reading this on Thought Catalog. Good job."

The pictures feel as essential to me as the text. I was always interested in including pictures with writing.

I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.

I'm not very close to my parents. My stepfather (in my opinion) was very emotionally abusive when I was growing up and there were a lot of other issues I don't feel comfortable talking about publicly. I spent a lot of time in therapy dealing with these issues though, and I feel i'm finally starting to move past them.