Woven

The novel has slowly been making its rounds through the test readers and it makes me feel more excited about this particular journey. I can sit here, in front of laptop, all day and spit out blogs but I don’t think the act of writing little e-journals can highlight the total potential of someone’s literary skill. Nor do I think having 37.2k in tweets (which is how often I have been on Twitter since I joined) determines if you are a superstar. Yet, I’m always taken back by the amount of positive feedback I get from people who have read my entire book all the way through.

My editor (who is an SU alum because that’s how we roll) constantly tells me that I need to stop being surprised that people like what they’re reading.  There were several conversations that I had with her where I confessed that simply thought this novel wasn’t good enough. Shit, there were time when I actually hated what I was writing. I thought that perhaps my writing was too crude, too sexual, too crass, and too honest. But, she knows me well enough to remind me that fear has a way of distorting the way we view our own work.

Sure, I have talked about fear in length but the subject never gets old to me. I think its because there is a part of me that fears everything. I fear both failure and success but interestingly enough, I’m more prepared for failure. I’m almost 40 years old and I still don’t know how to prepare for success. What’s that supposed to look like? I can have avid dreams about winning the lottery and fictitiously plan out how I’m going to pay bills and live this super fantastic life. But that is just as fiction and the novel I wrote. There is no class in college that prepares you for success.

But then there is the more realistic side of my thoughts. What’s there to prepare for? We are talking about a self published novel and I’m completely realistic about the number of people that may actually buy this book. I will do my social media pushes but I do not anticipate my life changing much. I didn’t start writing because I wanted to become famous. I started it because this is something I just want to do.

That first story I ever wrote in 8th grade still lingers in my head. Writing was the one thing that I could do better than any one else in that class. My fellow classmates read this story that was based on a dream I had about how werewolves attacked the school. I was 8th grade famous for about a week. In High School, I wrote smut stories about some of my female teachers (ok, it wasn’t a proud moment…I was 14) that spanned pages and pages of loose leaf. I threw them away for fear that my mother would find them as she did the stash of Playboys I had in my drawer that I stole from my dad. lol

The point is that writing is something that I have always had time for. I still think about the comic book universe I created all those years ago and how I might, one day, still write about them. All my writing are woven together in some strange way, I just cannot be afraid to unleash it.