The Beginning

Well it seems I now have a Blog I can call my very own. I'm sure this will be an interesting experience, so here goes.

I am a writer. It took me 37 years to say that but there it is. I have finished a manuscript and am now looking for an agent. I guess that makes me a writer. However, I would like to be an author, which means that I need to be published. Not so big a wish on my birthday candles.

I also didn't think that writing would be harder than any twelve hour shift I worked as a waitress. But it is. And more aggravating than any jerk who wants ketchup with his baked potatoe. I have screamed and cried and torn out my hair and yelled at my child, and yelled at myself and put off the housework, and sometimes dinner, all in the name of just getting one more page written, one more draft revised, one more query re-written and re-written and re-written.

Nathan Bransford recently had a post about what writers give up to get what they want - to be published. It was an extremely enlightening post and made me want to go back to waitressing ASAP because I was doing almost all the things the post said not to do. All to be published.

To have my name on a jacket cover, to walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble and see my name (or more precisely, my nome de plume) on the bookshelves, to know that someone in NYC is discussing me and my book and talking about MONEY at the same time. LOL

This is what we, as writers, all crave. To know that we've created something that no one else has, okay, maybe this isn't what I mean to say, I write genre fiction, romance to be precise, so it HAS been done, a thousand million times before, but that's okay. No one has ever written MY story, done so in MY voice.

It's all very exciting really, and more than frustrating, especially when I KNOW that the book I've written is SO MUCH BETTER that the last 5 books I've read in my genre, and WHY the HELL can't I find an agent to represent me because I will make everyone involved a boatload of moolah. ARGH!!!

Such is the life of a writer. And I knew it going in, when I gave up the restaurants, and the easy cash, and the life on the beach, (the great life I had on the beach) to move to the Piedmont to be with my aging/ill/crazy parents, so my daughter could be with her grandparents and we would maybe have a better life (than on the beach??? I don't think so) but here I am - finally able to call myself A WRITER.