Feeling the Groove

I've only been at this writing thing again now for a few days and I'm starting to feel as if I've found a groove. I managed to get about 900+ words written today in SEEKING LIGHT AURORA and finished editing a scene in THE PREPARATION. I've read it over and over again, success at writing is a matter of persistence and consistency. You have to persist against the torrent of rejection and criticism and be consistent in your writing habits - meaning, you have to write and you have to write habitually.

Much of writings allure for me comes in the characteristics that accompany the typical writing career. The very fact that the writer lives much of his/her time in perpetual solitude is so exhilarating to me. You mean I can spend much of my time alone and not be considered "weird" or "abnormal"? Well, I probably still will. I also like the idea that being a writer is very much a life-time pursuit - it IS a vocation. It does not matter if I make money at my writing - any money - and this was something that I really struggled to understand and come to grips with. Herman Melville comes to mind again and again. The poor guy lived in poverty and started writing and wrote for 11 years and tried to make a career out of it. Failed. After 11 years he supposedly gave it up and worked the rest of his life as a customs inspector.  So much for what I heard. It appears as if Melville was successful for a short time with his first few novels, but Moby Dick only made him a grand total of $500 in his lifetime. The point is - writers are SUPPOSED to be poor, destitute, sometimes even a little mad. Herman was considered crazy until his wife got him off the sauce. His writing career would, for all intents and purposes, be considered a failure.  

I want to write. I enjoy writing, as long as I keep myself from getting hung up on the odds of striking the big-time like Stephen King or Stephanie Meyers. In reality, I don't write my stories for other people - I never have. I don't ever remember writing something so someone else could read it. I wrote because it was something inside of me trying to get out. The story wanted to be free and by writing it out, it somehow makes my characters come to life for me. I have written IN THE MEADOW, and now those characters will be with me, living out their lives forever. I will always look back fondly on the experiences and the emotions I felt writing that book - as I do with all my books and with all my characters. They are all a part of me - each one of them an amalgam of different people in my life. I just edited a scene in THE PREPARATION, and got to experience wonderful emotions between two people. It is a blessing to be a writer, a creator. It is a fleeting glimpse of what it must have been like for God when he formed Adam and Eve. 

Being a writer is the perfect fit for me. I spend my free time each day reading books on all kinds of different subjects: math, retirement, business, geography, religion, etc. It is all fodder for my stories. I don't agonize over plot or storyline - they just come to me from the void - and there are so many I don't think it will be possible to ever run short of ideas to write about. 

Like my scientific predecessors - the natural scientists of the turn of the century - I will soon be self-supporting in retirement, and so I will have no need to make money at my writing. Unlike Herman, I have open and ready access to a flat and nearly instantaneous distribution system that puts my work in front of the entire world - at no cost to me. So there is no better time in human history to be a writer. Gone are the days of rejection letters and manuscripts buried at the bottom of the slush piles. Gone are the days of dealing with returns and being dropped from your agent because your sales figures are not what someone else thinks they should be. Now a writer can write whatever he/she wants to write - whatever interests them. We can write, edit, upload to Amazon and move on to the next project and let nature take its course. There is no guarantees with any career. I might make it big and become a household name. More than likely, I will write and sell some books and live my life is relative obscurity. I mean, I had never heard about Amanda Hocking before until I stumbled onto her name in an article. By then, she had already become a millionaire. So, in essence, every writer pretty much lives in oblivion, except to your readers.  And your readers never really know YOU, they just know books that you have written because they happen to have read them.

In the end, it is not real, because we all live in obscurity. At least I get to write about it. Usually can't do that at a nine-to-five.