Welcome to the World of Writing

One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from a movie called Stick It.  It's about ja girl who's forced back in to gymnastics after she walked out of the worlds.  If you haven't seen it, it's a fantastic movie.  Anyway, here's the quote:

Gymnastics tells you no. All day long. It mocks you over and over again. Telling you you're an idiot. That you're crazy. If you like running full-speed towards a stationary object, vault's for you. If you like pealing pieces of skin the size of quarters of your hands... bars is for you. Because the only thing more fun then rips, is when your rips get rips. It's super sexy. And floor, are you serious, I mean who doesn't want to parade around in a leotard getting wedgies and doing dorky choreography? It's delicious. If you like falling, then gymnastics is thee sport for you! You get to fall on your face, your ass, your back, your knees, and your pride! It's a good thing I didn't like falling... I LOVED IT!

So, why am I telling you this quote?  Quite simply because, in my eyes, I can equate it to writing.

Sure, as a writer we don't actually physically run toward a stationary object, but we do run toward the ending of a book, not knowing exactly how it's going to turn out.  We may not have skin peeling off our hands, but we have wrist problems from writing so much, and headaches from listening to characters.

But, most of all, it's the falling that really got to me.  We don't literally fall on our faces, our asses, our back or our knees.  But when you don't know where to take the book, it feels a little like you were running full out and landed on your face.  When you realize half way through a chapter that you don't need it, or the one before, it feels a little like the ground has fallen out beneath you and you find yourself on your ass not sure you want to do the work.

And out prides?  The pride of a writer takes a beating unlike almost any other profession in the world.  We work for ages on this book, something that we've poured our heart and soul in to, we fuss over it like it's our child, and worry about whether it's any good.  Then we send it out in to the world and hope that we've done everything right.

As I learned this past week, more often than not that results in a fall.  Our pride takes a beating as we get back rejection letters telling us that the work that we poured in to our manuscripts or short stories wasn't enough.  That we did it wrong.

Being a writer isn't all fun and games.  To be a writer, we have to (as the quote says) not just like falling, but love it!

We have to be able to get past those beatings and continue onward toward our ultimate goal.

With that in mind, I'm going to take that story and submit it somewhere else.  After I lick my wounds for a couple of days.  Because, no matter how bad of a beating my pride took, I know that this is what I want to do.  And if I want a story published, I have to be persistent.

Now, I just have to find somewhere that I think is good enough for my story, and hope they think it's the right fit too.

Wish me luck!

Have you gotten any rejection letters yet?  What do you do to keep yourself from thinking that you're not good enough?

A commitment

Now that NaNoWriMo is officially over, I have decided to recommit myself to my blog.  In November I took on the insane challenge of a blog post a day.  Unfortunately that it not something I can keep up with on a permanent basis.  For one thing, by the end of the month I no longer had any topics to write about.  And without any writing to complain about, I'm going to have even less to write about.

Instead, after coming to the conclusion that I want to post more often, I have decided to post once a week.  That day is going to be Sundays, starting today.  (Yes.  I do realize that it's almost midnight and I should really have done this earlier, but as I was at a hockey game with my boyfriends parents, it was a little difficult.)

My commitment is to have it posted every Sunday no later than midnight.  I cannot guarantee that they will all be the greatest posts in the world, but I can guarantee that they will help you to follow my incredibly exciting journey to being published.  (2012 will be the epic year of querying.)

The next year will include a submission to ABNA (Amazon Breakout Novel Award), NaNoEdMo, and the sending out of my first query letters.  Therefore you can expect to hear all about how much I hate editing...why I hate my characters...and the arrival of my first rejection letter.

I know you're just as excited as me, and I hope that hearing about my journey will help you to start (or continue) yours.  But, if all this blog brings you are a few laughs, I'm happy with that too.