Reader Question: When did you decide to become a writer, or is it something you’ve always done?
It has been a few weeks (maybe longer) since I last addressed a reader’s question on my blog. As many of you know, I’ve been busy promoting Hunted, but today I wanted to take a break from that and my querying of The Caein Legacy to write something a bit different.
Earlier this week, I had someone ask me when I decided to become a writer, or if it was something I’ve always done. I don’t think writing was ever a conscious decision for me; I have always been a writer. In fact, I remember writing short stories as a hobby when I was in elementary school (2nd or 3rd grade may have been when I started). Sometimes we would have class projects that involved writing stories, but I took it one step further. I kept a spiral notebook and would write in that as well. And my writing has always been fictional; I’ve never managed to keep a journal/diary for more than a couple of days before growing bored with it – it’s just not my style.
Throughout school, I was always writing. A couple of days ago, I was digging through my filing cabinet of unfinished tales, and I came across the very first short novel I wrote. I believe I was in 7th or 8th grade when I wrote it, and I would guess it’s probably the length of a kid’s chapter book. I keep it around to remind myself of where I started with my “serious” writing, and how much I’ve progressed in the last 25 years or so. That story was called “The Space Bandits: The Adventures of Brad and Kris”. It is highly unlikely that I will ever go back to that story, or it’s sequel (“The Space Bandits: Saving Kris”). I simply don’t have much interest in writing books for that young of an audience. But the memories of writing those stories are worth having kept the manuscript for all of these years.
By the time I was 17, I had started writing The Moon’s Eye, which ultimately did get published almost a decade after I had written it. When I was writing that book, and the two that followed it in the series, I had never intended to publish them. I love to write, but putting my work out there for everyone to see was a terrifying idea. In complete honesty, I didn’t want to publish, even after multiple friends and family members asked me to. It was two years after I got married that my husband finally convinced me to go forward with self-publishing (we were together for two years before we were married – he has great patience with me and amazing perseverance to have managed this feat!). The Moon’s Eye trilogy didn’t sell many copies, and part of that was I had no idea what I was doing when it came to marketing. The bigger factor in the lack of sales was that I still did not believe in myself enough to consider that a stranger would want to read my books, and I never put forward the effort to sell them.
As those of you who have been following my posts about Hunted may have realized, I actually wrote that book ten years ago. I spent a couple years working on that book, filed my copyright, and then put it aside in my filing cabinet. I did nothing with it beyond that. I had almost forgotten about that manuscript entirely, until earlier this year. I wrote a post a few weeks ago, The Hunted Journey, that has more details about why I decided to go forward with publishing that book this year. This time, I want to make my books known, I want to share the story. Many things have changed in my life in the past decade, and I think some of those changes have better prepared me for publishing Hunted (and hopefully The Caein Legacy, soon).
Writing has always been a part of me, a thing that brings me joy, a means to escape the real world for a time (and I have needed the escape this week more than most). Perhaps I am slow to learn, but it was only within the last year that I began to believe my stories are worth sharing with the world. To conclude a long post, I have always been a writer, but it has only been recently that I made the decision to publish more of my work.
To all of those aspiring authors out there: Don’t be afraid to share what you’ve written. There is someone out there that wants to hear your story.