Beyond 30: The Next Chapters

It has been just over a month since I last posted and since then, I have spent nearly every day writing, trying to treat the process almost like a full-time job. And despite all the workshops, writers groups, and critique meetings, every single day I feel a little less convinced that I can do this. Though I certainly have my moments of clarity and conviction, more frequent are the days where I've been sitting in front of the computer for three straight hours trying to shape a story into something that is relatable, beautiful, and relevant. I'm trying to write a story that I would want to read. And I feel in over my head.  Earlier in the year when I had first begun therapy in an effort to figure myself out and make better choices for my mental health, one of the things that I learned is that my need for control impedes my ability to start projects. It's turning out to be true that my deep fear of failure has begun to take control of my hands and of my thoughts, coloring ever

So, you may have read that I am writing a book ( here are the first unedited paragraphs if you were interested ) and so far the process has been a bit..well..intimidating. Over the last couple of weeks, I've taken a half a dozen writing/publishing workshops online and while these have proved very useful, it's evident that I've got a lot of work to do if I want to be a successful and more importantly published writer. It's not as though I was expecting this entire process to be easy because if it were, everyone would publish a book. There is, however, a lot more to it than I originally anticipated. Writers are not merely conveyors of a story; they are, at their heart, marketing gurus (which I am not). Selling a book also means selling your platform, building an audience, and connecting with the core of people that you want to read your story.  So, that's what I'll have to do.  And I kind of hate it.  I am really not much of a social media person. Over the years,

It has been almost two weeks since I made the possibly harebrained decision to write a novel instead of going back to work and the results so far are...mixed. Though I've taken a few writing workshops in the pursuit of sharpening up my dusty skills, it's apparent to me that I might be a bit in over my head. The process for publishing a novel is unsurprisingly not as simple as write a book, pitch a book, sell a book and then bang, boom money. Man, I wish it worked that way.  Initially, I gave myself a deadline of finishing up a rough draft by January and as I'm working on this novel, hammering out the rough outline of a story that I think others would want to read, I'm realizing that both my deadline and general plan are starting to look a bit unrealistic. When this idea first came to me, it seemed an obvious path forward: document my journey getting healthy, write the story, find an agent, sell my book. Now, I've taken a handful of writing workshops, penned the firs

The other night I had a dream so profound that it shaped my entire path forward.  For the last six weeks, I've spent literally all of my downtime job hunting, soul searching to pinpoint what it was that I wanted to do next, what was important to me, and how I was going to be intentional about making my own happiness a priority. And it was then that inspiration struck as it so often does in the middle of the night: I was going to write a book.  I've entertained this notion dozens of times over the years. The first time I tried to earnestly write a book was about ten years ago, some couple hundred pages still sitting idly on my hard drive. Every now and again, I'll pick up where I left off only to lose sight of my goal with that story, trying to figure out what my main character would be doing now. Maybe that book will never be finished.  But this one might.  The story seemed so clear now, so obvious. They say that you should write what you know and what you like and what I l