by Christine Lynn Herman When I first started writing, it was something I did entirely on my own. I was a teenager who spent countless hours immersed in the fictional worlds I’d created, falling for characters that only existed in my head. It was incredibly fun. It was also incredibly lonely. When I tried to talk to my friends about my writing, they were happy I liked doing it, but they didn’t really understand it. I could talk for hours about my ideas, my characters, the plot points I was wrangling with or that fun banter scene I’d just written. But it felt like I had no one who would listen--like there would always be a part of me that nobody else understood. I wrote many terrible first drafts of YA books. I spent countless hours working on my craft and doing industry research, reading every author or agent’s blog I could find. And one day, in 2015, I realized it wasn’t enough. I needed to show my work to other people if I ever wanted to be ready to send it to agents. So I...