Well, all the cool kids are doing it...

...and also, I've got some very important procrastinating to do, so hi everybody. The "R" in my name is for "Ryan," and I've been teaching high school English in the part of New York with cows for 16+ years. I joined Prose in October 2019 because I hadn't written anything for a very long time but wanted to. The community here kept me inspired and motivated so that I actually stuck with writing and worked on it for real. Through all the practice and experimentation, I improved.

The breakthrough came when I wrote a story titled "Rideshare": it was the best thing I'd written to that point, and when readers told me so, I moved from the maybe-someday phase of writing to the going-for-it phase of writing. Eighteen months later, I have a handful of small-outlet publications under my belt and 60,000 words of a novel. I'm a teacher--it's who I am and I love it--but regardless of how far my writing goes or doesn't, it no longer feels silly to think of myself as a writer. As a friend once told me, "A writer is one who writes," nothing more, nothing less, and I knew that, but Prose helped me to feel that. It's home.

(Longtime readers might remember "Rideshare," but if anyone is curious to read it, I'm happy to say the story got picked up by Sleet Magazine: https://www.sleetmagazine.com/selected/love_v13n2.html)

Cheers, everyone. Glad to be Prosing with you.