Hello, World! After a year of silence, I have returned!
And the return is triumphant indeed.
This past weekend, I attended Life, the Universe, and Everything conference, and just like last year, I absolutely adored it! I got to meet so many wonderful people and some of my favorite authors as well– *cough* Brandon Sanderson *cough* Orson Scott Card *cough*.
Whew. Excuse me.
Anyway, I didn’t think I was going to learn anything different about the writing world that I hadn’t learned last year.
I’m pleased to report I was wrong. I didn’t learn nearly as many things, but I came away with one important point I have missed for the last 9 months:
If you want something to happen, you have to make it happen.
I’ve had a lot of less-than-savory experiences that initiated my silence. To make a boring story interesting, my graduate doldrums consumed me. The swirl of questions, indecision, and, on occasion, depression buried me and I found myself paralyzed by fear and discouragement. And I didn’t know how to get out.
That being said, as I sat through the panels at LTUE, I noticed a common denominator with a percentage of them: a number of them were self published.
Now, how does that have anything to do with swirls of confusion and intensifying sadness? I’ll tell you. When these authors didn’t find success and were stuck in their own Bermuda Triangles, they picked themselves up and rowed. They threw all their efforts into making their boat move. They made publication happen.
Over the past 9 months, I’ve been waiting for a fickle wind to pull my boat full speed ahead. I made sporadic, half-hearted efforts to get into the writing field and to get my book written. Thankfully, I picked myself up for NaNowriMo and outputted a zombie novel entitled Gifted (more details later!) and entered a poem into the National Amateur Poetry Contest in December. Both of those had their own rewards, but this concept of getting out and getting things done didn’t hit me until I saw it over and over again at the conference, particularly in Orson Scott Card’s keynote address at LTUE.
In the address, Card talked about how his parents got things done. His whole childhood, if his parents had a good idea, they always brought it to life. He doesn’t remember how they did it, but it happened often, and they were successful. Card then went on to do similar things while in college. In his theater classes, if he felt something wasn’t written very well, he’d rewrite and direct the scenes that didn’t work and in doing so, managed to fill the house every night. He. Made. Things. Happen.
So now what? I guess from a writing standpoint, I wasted a couple months of potential productivity. But that doesn’t have to keep happening. When I get down to it, I wasn’t completely sedentary. As I mentioned, I did manage to spill out a novel this past November, and I entered a poetry contest on a whim. I have raw materials I can work with. I have a start. And now, it’s time to write.
ACE
The Plotter's Apprentice 