About Me

Call me R. Former Inkie, part-time editor, dreamer, writer, reader, traveler, vegetarian, flutist. I'm one of those that began writing when they were in Pre-K... except it was a five-page book with stamps as illustrations. (I think I still have it. Maybe Mum recycled it... I have no idea.) Anyways. I grew up reading and writing.

Mum saw IP in the newspaper and pointed it out to me. I treated myself to an account for my twelfth birthday, thinking I'd probably be done with it after a few months. But no, it was so much more. I learned to love my writing. I learned to hate it, too, but mostly to take that hate and make the words better. I learned how to give a good critique. But it wasn't just writing I learned... I made friends. I have friends. But these friends were compatibly random. They listened to me, and I listened to them. I'd never had people like that before. Ever. We could talk for hours about the weirdest things; there was a group, called the Pink Panthers, that I spent my Sundays with. We had Word Wars. There were the Insomniacs, too (title self explanatory) that I sometimes hung out with when I couldn't sleep.

Then, HarperCollins decided to change.
Change? Change! Change. The format, they assured us, but in essence, Inkpop would be the same. It would be different. It would be greater. We would love it, they told us. Then somebody leaked what it was going to look like. I thought they were joking at first. That? No way! It looked, dear readers, like a rotten pumpkin drowning in a pale blue ocean. It was modernized. Our beloved forest green-and-white was going for good. It felt like I was moving, not just to a new website but to a new home, because that was essentially what Inkpop was to me.

As the new Inkpop was finally revealed and the days fell away, I found myself less and less attracted to it. Many of the senior Inkies left. The quality of writing began to deteriorate. Even the Inkies that had come less recently didn't bother to promote their writing. Bad writing began to make it to the top. For a couple of months, people slowly trickled away. (I know I did.)

Then I was told that Inkpop was about to disappear off the face of the internet. Well, not technically. But it was being sold to Figment. I clicked on the link. The same horror (albeit intensified) that I'd felt months ago when seeing the new template returned. I looked back at my email. Three days. I had three-friggin-days to say goodbye to all the friends I'd made. This time, rather than moving to another neighborhood, it was like my house had burned down.

Turns out that not everybody decided to show up at Figment. I rarely went on myself. I tried Wattpad, TeenInk, etc, but it was like being at a foster home. I couldn't find my (literal) Inkie family. Or anybody, really. I pulled away from writing and into reading others' stories and editing them.

RIP, Inkpop, I'll always miss you. You taught me about the world in so many ways.

Writing is my closet passion. Why? Sharing my writing with someone, to me, feels like an intimate action. So I edit, and I read. I remember Inkpop and everything I learned. If you're reading this and you're an Inkie-- happy writing, my friends :)

Love,
Onions.