From the Keyboard of an Emerging Writer

Also known as a beginner who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing.


A wee bit of back story, first. An assignment I'd written for my writing class was handed back to me a few days ago. On my mark sheet was a comment (my teacher is totally awesome and always has something positive to say even though she's a very hard marker) that I should really look into submitting my work for publication, because that should be where I'm headed. Obviously, I took that very much to heart and spent the better part of the morning looking for literary magazines that accept submissions from everyone. There are lots. Even though half of them are no longer in operation...buuuuut, oh well. I still managed to find a ton of possibilities.

Now comes the big problem. The writing. I don't think I'll mind sending something out, or even being rejected (well, maybe a little, but something that's ginormous like a publisher for a book, I think I'd care more about being rejected for), but I haaaate the writing part. Which doesn't really make sense, even to me. But from what I've gathered, professional writers run into this problem. It's not all lollipops and gumdrops, it's legitimate hard work. And I haven't felt passionately about anything I've written in a really long time. It's kinda meh, but everyone else is okay with it, so I just run with it. So I need to write. And it hurts. For all intents and purposes, it causes me physical pain to force myself to write. I just need to get out there though. While earning even a small cash payment would be awesome, right now I just want my name in print. I need validation that I can actually do this, that there's a point to it. To prove that I have potential, even. I don't need to be famous. I don't ever need to be famous. But what I do need is to know that somewhere out there, someone is going to read my work. Hopefully they'll think it's good, but if it's not, I think I could be okay with that. I just want to get out there. I wanna give it a shot. If I succeed, that'll be amazing. If I don't, well, I gave it a shot. My ultimate plan for life has died (probably a dramatic, self-eviscerated samurai style death) but I can move past that.

So, tonight I plan to write. Up until I wrote that down, I had no plans to write. I just wanted to get away from that paragraph. But, now that I think about it, it's probably a good idea. If it's publishable, that's fantastic. As it stands, though, I just need to get in the habit of writing, and forcing myself to write even if I don't like the end product.

Here goes nothing.