I fulfilled my 2013 New Year’s Resolution today. Yep, it took me all year but I did it. Now, I certainly didn’t plan to wait until the last minute. Like most people, I made the resolution in good faith and got to work right away. But then things proved more difficult than I thought.
in 2012, I fulfilled my resolution of finding a voice and building a platform. (Thank you Wanderlust and Lipstick!)
My New Year’s resolution for 2013 was to start submitting my fiction. Sure, I have brought my stuff to writers’ workshops. I’ve had other writers read and critique my work. I’ve read passages to friends but that’s all “safe” in my world. I have a friendly and supportive writers’ group. I attended reputable workshops where the goal is to help writers improve and when I share my work, it’s with people who care about it. I wanted to go to the next level in 2013.
I wanted to send my stuff to a stranger. I wanted that stranger to evaluate my work at face value on it’s own merit. There would be no filtering through the lens of our relationship, no agenda of helping me be a better writer, no benefit of a doubt. Just my story and a reader. To me, it felt like writing without a net.
Somehow, I just couldn’t get it together. I’d have a good story, but no home for it. I’d learn of a writing contest that sounded fun, but always too late (I thought) to be able to really go for it. Around August, I gave up and resigned myself to hobby fiction (I anesthetized the pain with heavy doses of Sherlock and Doctor Who for comfort.)
It wasn’t until late October that I learned about Author Quest. I was cultivating ideas for NaNoWriMo and was torn between a pair of options when I discovered the Jim Henson company was sponsoring a contest to find a fan of The Dark Crystal to write a book set in the Dark Crystal universe.
I was back in the game! The contest called for a 10,000 word sample of a 50,000+ story and the deadline was December 31. I could do that!
Or so I thought. I didn’t count on a head injury interrupting my ambition. I felt the contest slipping through my fingers and I was at peace with just letting it go. You can’t win them all, right? That’s when the marvelous ladies of my writer’s group came to the rescue. They believed in me. They were excited for me. They made me feel like I would be letting them down if I didn’t finish the submission and enter it in the contest. I had lost my excitement, but theirs was contagious.
I had to do this. I set myself deadlines. I missed them. I revised the time-line and kept writing anyway. If I did fail, I would fail running! Then something wonderful happened!
I didn’t fail! I finished and I submitted my work. That’s right. I may still be unpublished but I’m working without a net now. Or maybe there is a net. It’s a net of friendship woven by the MoJo Writers every Thursday night. It’s what gives me the courage to let go of the trapeze and fly.
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie