Three Years
Tomorrow is the 3 year anniversary of my writing journey. It’s been a crazy ride so far. When I first decided to quit my job and get serious about writing, my plan involved something like “write a novel every year for ten years” while submitting short stories and hoping for a book deal.
How things change, eh? I discovered Heinlein’s Rules, attended a bunch of workshops including Clarion, and the self-publishing/e-book world came into being. Now my plan is more like “write ten novels worth of new material every year”, I’m hardly writing short stories at all this year, and I have quit submitting queries for books (for the moment). In these last three years, I’ve written over a million words, sold ten short stories, and self-published over twenty novels, novellas, and short stories.
I have seven years left in my ten year plan (I made a deal with my husband that I would be making a living from my fiction in ten years or I’d go get a different day job). I’ve learned so much, tried a lot of different things, put in a lot of work, over the last three years. I can only imagine where my skills will be in seven more years.
So I start my fourth year as a writer with a lot of optimism and a lot of hope. Also, because hey, this is still me, a lot of experiments planned. I’ve been absent from the blog because of one of these experiments. The novellas are going well and are a ton of fun to write, but also take a lot of writing time and energy. So the serial novel and the neo-pro interviews are on the back burner until March. I’ll probably be pretty scarce here for another month or so.
Three years. Feels like twenty sometimes and like a couple months others. I have a long way to go and a lot more to learn, but this is still the best job I’ve ever had. Here’s to seven more years of awesome (and hopefully another few decades beyond that).