How This Blog Was Born

 

 

So I guess the first thing that made me want to tell stories was my aunt. When I was little, my aunt would tell me stories a lot. The two I most vividly remember are “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and “The King of Toga-Toga”. At school, I would tell these stories to my friends, maybe adding in my own little details here and there… (My versions never did sound quite as good as the originals.😉)

The first story I remember making up myself was about a princess named Rachel who wanted to marry a man named Yaakov. (It was probably Parshat Vayetzeh that week.) I was in about second grade. I wrote it for a class we were doing on paragraphs or something like that. I vaguely remember reading it to the class and everyone clapping. After that, I do have a few memories of sitting down with a notebook and pencil during recess instead of playing on the slide.

When we moved to Israel at the beginning of third grade, I knew very little Hebrew. I would spend most of the day sitting around while everyone else worked. To fill the long hours of boredom, I would take an empty notebook, and fill the pages with short stories. While other kids might have covered their walls with photos and drawings, I covered mine in short stories I had written.

Eventually, I started writing longer stories, and would show them to my aunt. When I was in fourth grade, she suggested that I send a story to a story contest. For the next week or two, she helped me write and edit a story about a unicorn named Carnation who was teased for being a different color than the other unicorns. Sadly, I got the email address wrong, so the story never got sent in.☹

In sixth grade, I wrote a story to submit to an Israeli writing contest. I sent it to the teacher, who read it, and said that instead of submitting it to the contest, she would put it in the school newspaper. That was definitely ranked as one of my top fifteen proudest moments.😊

Then, if I had a story that I wanted to share, I would send it to each friend and family member individually by email. This could create problems, like if I accidentally forgot to send it to someone. That’s when my mom suggested I create a blog.

My parents set up the site, and I did the rest. I chose the design, name, and color. I wrote my very first post, the introduction to the blog, and posted “The Time I met J.K. Rowling”, my first blog story.

And that, my friends, is how Sima’s Story Corner was born.