Monthly Archives: August 2008

I’ve always had this sort of fantasy about what having a career in writing would be like. I could have a little home office and spend chunks of my day writing and polishing, creating something worth mentioning. Then I would send it off to the Mysterious Business People. Consumers would then buy this book which, in my mind, sprung fully-formed in the bookstore back-stock, and the Mysterious Business People would send me money.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

So now I’m freshly twenty-two — oh yeah, my birthday was the 10th — and I had a moment of, “This is it. Now is when I have to put up or shut up.” Which, realistically, means that I can get started on 6 – 10 years of rejection and “make it”* when I’m somewhere in my thirties. This is the beginning of me trying to reconcile with myself that my fantasy of a career will never be as easy as I imagine it.

I think the big thing that disillusions me about being a writer is that amount of work it really takes to “make it.” The more reading I do the more I realize that this is going to be just as grueling a job as any other, sometimes more so because it will be so personal. Getting published will not be the end of the road — finishing another novel won’t be the end of it. I’ll have to promote myself. I’ll have to cope with change, I’ll have to work the Mysterious Business end of things — I will have to learn how to do that. And I’m uncomfortably aware that I could write a hundred books without ever really “making it.”

I don’t mean this post to be morose — it’s certainly a shitty comeback — but I’m having this unfortunate moment of realism, and I need to vent it. I need to be able to look back and tell myself that I wasn’t unprepared for failure, and that I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But I hope that it’ll be rewarding, but I’m sure that it’ll be worth it if I can “succeed.”

Whatever that “success” may be.

Just a small interruption in the blog-hiatus, but Eliza posted about Crit Partner Match, which describes itself simply as: “It’s like eHarmony or Match.com for Crit Partners!”

It’s pretty new from the looks of it (a couple days old?), but the concept is awesome; I joined up, shall dig around more when I don’t feel like the living dead, and I’m hoping to come out of it with someone to talk with and bounce stuff off of. I recommend checking it out, especially if (like me) the idea of meeting face-to-face with other writers in the community makes you want to hide under the bed.

Hey there, world. I know it’s been two weeks since I last updated, and I’ve been formulating updates in my head and… not posting them. ^^; So, consider this my hiatus notice — I’ll be back on August 25th. By then I should be able to talk about a couple things:

1. The big thing going on in our household. I’ve alluded to it before, but it’s one of those things I can’t just announce on the internet without making sure everything is covered.

2. My thoughts on Twilight. Part of the reason I’ve been away is because I’ve been following the internet explosion reaction to Breaking Dawn, and I’ve decided that I’m going to record my thoughts as I make my way through the first book to figure out exactly what everyone loves about it.

3. Stuff about what I’ve been reading lately. I’m nearly done with the Historian, which is… interesting, I think. More on that later. And I recently (read: in the last six months) finished Cryptonomicon and Good Omens, both of which were fabulous and I’d love to talk about. I also mean to talk about my love/hate relationship with Neuromancer.