Taking stock of my writing career

So there I was, minding my own business, when along comes the April IWSG question to make me get all self-reflective.

In case you’re new here, the first Wednesday of every month is Insecure Writers Support Group day, on which we insecure writers share our doubts, fears, struggles, and triumphs. Our awesome April co-hosts are Jemima Pett, Nancy Gideon, and Natalie Aguirre. We’re also given an optional question we can answer in our posts. This month’s question is: Do you remember writing your first book? What were your thoughts about a career path on writing? Where are you now and how is it working out for you? If you’re at the start of the journey, what are your goals?

You can find an abbreviated version of my literary origin story (how’s that for pretentious?) on the About page of this blog. The really abbreviated version is that I’ve always wanted to write but spent the first 45+ years of my life assuming I had no talent (without, you know, really actually trying to do it). I think middle age makes us braver, so I finally decided to just, you know, try. And less than a year after that I had a messy first draft of a real, actual novel. That was about 8 years ago.

I now have a just-about-finished draft of that novel, a messy draft of another novel (that second one is known here at Camp WTF The Revision from Hell), and a growing collection of published short stories. Not terrible considering that I have a full-time job as an academic librarian/library administrator at a large research university.

My thoughts on a career in writing: Honestly, anything resembling a true career in writing will have to wait till I retire. I’m making progress, publishing things, and learning a lot, but I don’t have the energy or stamina to build a second career while still working in my current one. I’m just now figuring that out after busting my backside until I was so exhausted and demoralized, I stopped making much progress at all. Now that I’m not pushing myself so hard, writing is getting fun again, and so is the day job. We need to be productive, yes, but we also need to rest and putter around the house and exercise and do stuff with those weird people who live with us (fam… something. In my case, 2 large, occasionally smelly men who claim they’re related to me. One of them eats all my food, including my Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. On an entirely unrelated note, would anyone like to help me dispose of a body?)

So, my goals at this point are to:

1. Keep learning and practicing the craft. Read. Take workshops. And write, write, write, without stressing so much about the outcomes.
2. Finish the Revision from Hell. I think it has the makings of an entertaining story, and I hope to enjoy the process of carving away the crap to find it–like Michaelangelo carving away extraneous marble to find the statue, only with much less skill and elegance and much more swearing (and now I want to plumb the depths of the interwebs to find out if Michaelangelo had a potty mouth. This, friends, is why I don’t get things done.)
3. Write more short stories. Submit them. Enter them in contests. Experiment with genres and styles and lengths and voices. Short stories are great for that.
4. Find a writing community. I had one before I moved. I’m on the periphery of a few, both online and in person. But I haven’t quite found where I fit. I’m working on it.

I’m not the most patient person. I’m pretty Type A and pretty hard on myself. But I’ve hit my limits, at least for now, and I’m finding this new, less-demanding approach to writing to be really liberating. Sometimes I catch myself wishing I’d started when I was younger, so I’d have more time to build a career as an author, but time machines only exist in fiction. I have to work with what I’ve got, and what I’ve got is a demanding full-time job, a family I love (when they aren’t stealing my junk food), and an aging body that needs rest and exercise. I can wear myself out fighting that reality, or I can embrace it and find joy everyday while still making progress. I’m choosing the latter.

At least for now.

The monthly chuckles

Now that I’m done being all introspective, let’s laugh!

I mean, is it even a story if there’s no murder?

And finally, me wrangling the Revision from Hell: