A Grand Beginning

Let's start from the very beginning--it is, after all, a very good place to start. But it would probably take too long, so I'll spare you the drama. I had a blog, long long ago, and I have decided to start a new one. It will give me something to do when I really should be doing something else.

I am an aspiring writer. Will I ever achieve the dream? Maybe. But this blog will serve, in part, to help myself along. Right now, I find that too many things take away from my time. There's school, then there's work, then there's my internship (editing), and then my social life, though that last one is debatable. Don't tell my friends--the fish. Yeah, if you look down and to the right you'll see them. You can feed them if you like.

This April, I will finally finish my undergraduate degree, yay! And then I will be off to bigger and better things! Or so I hope. I've been trying to scope out the New York scene and try to find an "in" over there, but no success so far. If I can't do that and be an editor, I should just move out somewhere random and finally finish writing my book.

I know, it seems like everybody you talk to is writing a book. But really, how many of them are actually going to buckle down, finish it, revise it, revise it again, and then maybe (with a lot of luck) find an agent or an editor. I don't claim to be any sort of pro at this. I'm horrible at finishing my stuff. But I've realized that the biggest thing that stops me is myself.

I used to start writing something, and then I'd stop after a few pages, disgusted that I didn't sound more like a "real" author. Now, after meeting some authors and going to some symposiums, I've realized that they really are just people like me, and they've churned out more than one crappy story that will never see the light of day. The difference is that they keep going. They work at it, hard! I have to remember that my first draft is not written in stone. Man is that hard for my editor self! Writing without caring too much about the quality of my work has been a work in progress. I've written lots and lots of papers for school, and I'm used to being able to write something fairly decent on the first go. But a novel is so very different from an essay.

Right now, I'm in what some might call the murky middle. That seems to be the hardest part for me, when I'd most like to give up and start on something new. This is the moment when my "not caring" is put to the test. If I care about it too much, it loses the fun, the adventure of discovering the characters and exploring a new world. That's when I stop. I start thinking about what everyone else would think about it. So I simply do my best to not care. Screw them, write for yourself. There's plenty of time to think about that after the novel is finished.