Category: Writing Testimonial

You’re Insecure About Your Work, And That’s Okay

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

The-reason-we-struggle-with-insecurity

I’ve been reading a lot of words of encouragement lately about how to be a better writer. How to motivate yourself, engage with your readers, what to do and what not to do. A lot of it has centered around the idea that creative folks have a tendency to be extremely self critical about their work. In fact, one of the issues that writers seem to deal with is self-doubt to an amazing degree. I speak from personal experience when I say that my own issue is usually a crippling fear of my work being judged as inferior or lacking, which often can stall me when I’m just about to do a major writing push.

“What if it’s not good enough?”

“What if it’s not received well?”

“What if it’s not engaging enough?”

“What if the material is found offensive and I get yelled at on Twitter?”

(That last one is particularly troubling, but that’s an issue for another blog post).

The thing is, lots of people are insecure about their work. I mean, there are doctors and lawyers out there who worry about the services they provide. Having a crisis of confidence isn’t just an issue for the creative sphere. However, I believe that the inherent issue about creators taking it much worse than in other fields is the fact that the rest of the world invalidates creators on a regular basis.

Being an artist isn’t valued the way it should be in our society. People ask writers to do hours of work for pennies, for nothing, for exposure. They ask artists to ‘just draw me this, it’ll look good in your portfolio.’ And everyone can write, can’t they? So why hire someone who is a professional in the field, when you can cobble something together for cheaper? Thank goodness it’s not this way everywhere but ask anyone who has a child if they’re pleased their kid is a writer, and the response you’ll often hear is that they wish that child had been a ________ (insert higher paying profession here). Being an artist remains, to a large extent, looked at as a dalliance, a pie in the sky, unless you make it big. Otherwise, you’re just messing around. You’re not actually doing anything.

And you wonder why we develop insecurities? Even the best potential writers grow up with this knowledge in their heads – that there are a million of you. That there are others out there probably better. That you won’t make any money. That you won’t get published. That you will never make it. That you will fail.

What a litany to feed your insecurity. What a mess to try and work through.

So when a writer has a complicated relationship with their work, with how they feel about themselves as a writer, it’s one thing to try and bolster them and get them into a better mindset. It’s one thing to try and help them see that there is validity to their work, and help them fight to be in a better headspace to create brilliant art. It’s another to invalidate their insecurity.

All feelings are valid. Whether or not they’re productive, that’s another thing. But I find that often when I’m reading encouraging messages about the writing process, there’s an insidious message behind the bolstering that sounds very much like tone policing to me. Don’t be negative about your work. Being negative is bad. It’s the mindkiller. You can do better than that. Just be positive. Face your fears. That’s what makes you a writer!

No. What makes you a writer is producing the work. What makes you a writer is getting up, putting words on paper, no matter how it happens. If you struggle with it but it happens, then you’ve written today. If you don’t struggle, good! You’ve written today. If you sit and slam your head into the wall and wonder if you’re wasting your life and then can’t write that day because of it, you’re a writer tackling a crucial issue in your writing process. I posit that grappling with your fears is part of the writing process. It’s a nasty, difficult, exhausting process, but it’s part of it. And telling folks that those fears should be tackled and moved past before a writer is ready is in my mind negating the struggle that that creator has been undertaking.

There’s this idea in our society that if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you tackle things head on, if you make the battle happen, then you’ll win. Isn’t that what G.I. Joe taught us? Our cartoons growing up? We learn a valuable lesson about self-esteem and courage in a thirty-minute episode and suddenly Knowing Is Half The Battle. The fact is the other half the battle is tackling the issue. But that tackling, that fight, is not a one day thing. For some, it can be a constant, ongoing struggle until they find the answer they’re looking for. And often the most well-meaning support can sound as though any writer who isn’t making headway into being positive about their work is a fragile writer that needs to toughen up to fly right. So I ask a question:

When did it become a sin to be sensitive about your work?

When did it become a problem to feel badly or have negative feelings?

Don’t get me wrong. I think life would be so much easier if we didn’t have these insecurities as creators. I think it would be amazing if every time I tackled a project, I didn’t have to face down some scary demons inside that tell me I’m a failure nobody will want to read. I wish that I could sit down every day without having to battle fear paralysis. But that’s my cross to bear. And others have their own. But I think that far too often these negative feelings are brushed aside with a forced ‘You Can Do It!’ smile that almost reminds me of those vintage WWII posters. But if you think of it for a second, those posters were propaganda, out to encourage people to forget about the fears they might have about, y’know, war.

I would never compare creation to war (because we don’t dodge bombs, folks, as much as it feels that way sometimes) but the cheerful enthusiasm without consideration for negativity being a part of people’s lives smacks to me of it’s own brand of writer propaganda. In our rush to try to improve ourselves as creators and help our fellows through the darkest places, we may be forgetting that people have a right to their feelings. And telling them How To Be Better might just be a way of telling them that they’re not good enough all over again.

I believe that instead of white-washing away the negative, of telling ourselves and each other that we need to have a stiff upper lip about our bad feelings, we need to acknowledge that they’re there. We need to acknowledge where they come from with sensitivity, honesty and empathy for each other. We need to support in ways that are a little less brute force. And we need to admit that for some, it won’t be a one-day, one-week or even one-year turn around. This might be a black dog battle that a creator fights every day of their lives.

And that’s okay. Because they’re still fighting.

Sure, it would be easier if the fight was over and the issue tackled and everyone had a self-esteem party. But that’s an internal struggle for the writer in question. But as long as they’re still fighting, and tackling, and writing, then that writer is doing the job. A writer, to be a writer, must do what they do: write. If they take deadlines for jobs, if they have responsibilities, they must meet them, even if the black dog of insecurity comes to visit. They have to pick up the fight because that’s what they agreed to do when they signed up to be a writer. But they’re still fighting. And they’re still writing. And they don’t always have to do it with a smile on their face, or in a way that other people feel is ‘best’. It’s their process, their feelings, and they get to have them. Even if it makes other people uncomfortable to see negativity. Even if other people wish they could ‘help make it better.’ Even if the prevailing idea is that feeling bad about yourself is bad.

Insecurity sucks. Feeling bad about your work sucks. But your feelings are your own.

May we all come to a place where we don’t have to feel this way. May we all fight that black dog and win someday. Until that time, I’m here with you, with my own dog to battle, getting the words done. But some days, I’m not doing it with a smile. And that’s okay too.

“Promise Small, Deliver Big”: The Art of Project Balance

by Shoshana, posted in On Writing, Writing Testimonial

During Metatopia, a discussion came up at one of the panels regarding best practices for freelance writers and game designers. The question had developed out of a talk about how to pitch for work on other people’s projects and how to develop a reputation for being a freelancer people want to work with. As I may have mentioned in a previous post, reputation really becomes your currency when dealing with a small industry like gaming. And I don’t mean that in a calculating sort of way. No, the kind of writer you are and the practices you’re known for really does impact what work you may get in the future.

One of the things that was mentioned at the talk was the expectations that freelancers put forward to their bosses. It can be a temptation to promise that you can do a whole lot and then, when the chips are down, fall short of deadlines. Why? Because there is a temptation as a freelancer to want to do more, to show that you can handle more, and then struggle to produce all those checks your body can barely cash. When someone brought that up, I had a thudding moment in my stomach and realized: holy cow, I do that all the time. In my excitement to get involved with great projects, I tell myself that it’s okay to take on ‘just one more thing’ because the opportunity might not come up again. And I do this, even when I know that I don’t have time to take on one more thing because I’m already struggling with what’s on my plate. But the urge to impress, the urge to be involved with all the cool things, is difficult to ignore. It’s also a bad practice I’m working on breaking, and here’s what I discovered in the process: nobody is going to think you’re better if you break your head to produce one more piece of work.

During the talk, Clark Valentine (an awesome writer and game designer) said something I really liked: “Promise small, deliver big.” And it resonated with me very deeply. I think it’s built into a lot of our culture to be performance driven, and one of the keys to performance is seemingly how much can you get done. It’s a very rat-race kind of thought process: how much work can I chug through per day, per week, per month, how much can I put on my resume. Yet by promising smaller – taking on fewer projects with perhaps less ambitious goals – you get to impress by delivering solid, well-considered work that you didn’t have to rush to produce. With less on your plate, you give your talent room to move and have a better chance of delivering on time than if you were stacked to the rafters with projects.

I speak in this case from personal experience. Over the last few years, I’ve fallen into the habit of saying yes to projects even when I knew I was vastly stretching my work load capacity. I figured ‘I can get it done by sacrificing some extra TV time or hang-out time’ and that work was more important. It took Hurricane Sandy proving to me that this kind of intense schedule-packing is dangerous. When I had no ability to work for one week, my schedule went into catastrophic meltdown and I’m forced to play catch-up on lots of things. Why? Because I packed my schedule so tight there was no room for error. That was my mistake, and one I don’t plan on making again.

So what did I learn from all this? A fundamental skill at being a writer or game designer or artist of any kind is knowing your limits. You may believe you’ll have all the time for the half dozen things on your plate, but it takes a combination of diligence, discipline and some handy time management to make sure you get it all done. Overbooking yourself will only take away the time you have to dedicate to each of your individual goals and ultimately water down what you have to offer. Plus, if you run into any snags, you need to have built-in time to still meet deadline and not lose control of the situation because of a single snafu. Then, if you have that extra time, you can deliver early and bigger than promised and THAT can be impressive all on it’s own.

This is how I’m planning on adjusting my work ethic from now on to be a more responsible freelancer, both to those I’m working for and to myself. Because in the end, I could sacrifice my TV time or friend time to work, but all work and no play makes Shoshana a disheveled, grouchy cat. And in the end, I want to enjoy my work and not resent it. By cultivating best practices, that’s how I’m going to keep writing and game design fun, which is one of the major reasons I chose this career.

Live and learn, they say. So here’s to a lesson learned.

Speak Out With Your Geek Out: Fantasy Writing, Like Bowties, Is Cool

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

Sorry for the little Doctor Who quote there, but it’s a good way to get things rolling. On my other blog, ReImagined Reality, I posted up my very first Speak Out With Your Geek Out post. The idea behind Speak Out With Your Geek Out is to support geekery in all its forms everywhere across the Internet. I began my other post like any Ten-Step Program would, so I’ll keep up the tradition…

Hi, my name is Shoshana and I write geek.

I don’t mean that I write like a geek, or that I write stories about people biting the heads off of live animals. No, I write geek in all forms in that I write science fiction, fantasy, horror and blog posts about everything geeky. I have written geek since I was knee high on a dog tiny. I started writing fantasy stories when I was in grade school. I re-wrote scenes from movies and comics and books that I didn’t like to include things I wanted to see (I didn’t even know that the term for that was fanfic by the way until MUCH later). I did all this because in my heart of hearts, I knew one thing – I had ideas. And they wanted to get out.

And my ideas were not happy relationship stories about women and men in everyday lives. They weren’t stories about children coming of age in a modern, normal world. Nope, my stories had witches and demons, robots and dragons, mutants and super heroes. To me, my stories had a drama that the every day world did not come anywhere close to exhibiting (and that’s the good drama, folks, not the sad silly drama). And when I was younger, I thought I was utterly alone in liking what I liked.

See, I grew up religious. And where I came from, people didn’t read Tolkien often. When I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia, other people looked at me funny. It wasn’t something they really trended on much and I felt like kind of a freak for having my head in realities that didn’t exist. In high school, though, I got lucky enough to meet another girl in my all-girls school who liked similar things. I felt less like a freak. She’s still my friend, over fifteen years later, and more like family. And all because we both spoke the same language, the language of looking at geek and digging it.

So I’ve written. And it’s not easy sometimes. People joke that all of my work is on some wacked out other planet. I’ve never written something that doesn’t have a supernatural bent to it, and that’s okay. I think that writing has to come from what you love and I love the unreal. I think that writing things that don’t exist in this world lets our minds expand and consider things that might never have been considered. The fantasy brings home concepts, criticisms or ideas that we might otherwise want to sweep under the rug, that we might never want to address. In the race to open our minds to accept bizarre vampire stories or alien love triangles, we writers manage to slip in themes about acceptance, prejudice, violence and ethical quandries for the audience to ponder.

And then, sometimes, we just want to write about demon dogs and hell beasts. Y’know, because that’s what tickles our noses.

The day’s come where I now write commentary on other people’s geek too. And that’s just as satisfying, where I get to talk about what I like and don’t like about the geek world around me. Sure, it’s not as satisfying as creating. Its not a short story done or a game development session come to fruition. It isn’t a novel nearly completed (oh God let me get it done soon!) but it is geek and it is good writing too. It is the spore-spreading of good geek content across the internet waves and that brings us as nerdlings together. So in the end, it is also words well spent.

I write geek. And I enjoy it. And I don’t think I could ever stop. After all, if you’re at something for so long, you start to look back and wonder what your life would be like without that thing, that one thing that lit you up for so long. And you honestly can’t imagine your life without it. That’s me and my writing, vampires and woogity demons and all.

May I never stop.

Way to Kick Word Count A$$ (Or, I pat myself on the back)!

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

So this year, NaNoWriMo has not been a labor of love. It has been a 14-hour delivery in which the doctor did not want to give any pain meds and you’re birthing the old fashioned way, screaming and choking and wishing ‘oh god oh god why did I ever want to do this in the first place’…

Yeah, “who the hell thought this was a good idea” went through my head a few times this year. Let’s just say, life has been very difficult lately for me so things have been driving me absolutely batty and therefore away from my writing. So, since that has been making life harder for writing, I fell way behind in NaNo until I thought I’d never catch up. I would lug my laptop all over town and then sit somewhere, staring at it with forlorn eyes for ages.

Until today. There are times you just have to fish or cut bait and today I just said I was going to sit myself down and do it. So I found a few things that made me able to write and man, did I hit my word count with a stick. How many words did I type today? Why, 14,036 in one sitting. Six hours of work, two teas later, I can’t feel my legs, I have a crick in my neck and I have to pee like mad (TMI, I know) but whew.

Total word count: 44,720. Nearly there folks, nearly there!

Plus, the story is finally coming together. This little crazy 14-baby that wouldn’t come out is finally turning into something that might actually be worth calling a novel. Loosely called “Prisoner Sixty-Three” as a codename, it’s my attempt at an alien abduction story and yet, as some of my friends know from my descriptions, it’s a lot more. I’m not going to talk a lot about it until it is DONE but lets just say it’s a whole lotta weird and it’s a different writing style then I’ve ever tried before. But, it’s also showed me a few tips about my writing that I didn’t know before. So here is what got me through the ridiculous word count jump, take this for what it is:

  1. Smut helps: Okay, so you’re stuck in a part of your story that honestly is so boring you want to cut your own feet off just to do SOMETHING interesting. Your characters are sitting around talking and honestly, you have no idea what the hell to do next. You’ve got another chapter where something has to happen, and you want to introduce a spooky element that you need to push the plot along. Okay, need to be spooky? Need to introduce some info? Mix in some smut. I know it’s cheap. I know it’s taudry. But why not, right? Sex happens in real life, and as long as you’re not making it too gross (as in not making it too out of awful left field or too wine and roses OMG I LURVE U high school nonsense) and write it well, there’s no reason a sex scene can’t make your story move a little bit where it’s getting a little saggy… And I just used saggy in the same sentence as sex. Moving on.
  2. Find a Place to Write You Like: This is meta-story here, but I cannot tell you how serious this one was to my state of mind. I had been trying to write all over town for the last week, everywhere from my room (NOT going to happen, with family drama to distractions from the cat to my PS3) to the local Starbucks (the playlist is SO irritating). I kept dodging around trying to find a place that was a writing haven until, low and behold, I came upon the right place. I just sat down and thought “where is the place where I have felt the most creative” and “where have I thought I could write the most when I walked in there”. The place I ran into was a place called Argo Tea in Manhattan and oh BOY did it work. Two teas later, I was settled in to write, relax, and work and oh boy, did I.
  3. Accept That You Will Not Always Write: Again, this is a meta-story thing, but I was kicking the garbage out of myself for the last few days that my writing this NaNo has been coming in fits and starts. I have been going from big word counts to four/six days of NO writing. And that’s awful. Then I’ll have a day like today when explosions happen, and you know what? That happens. Life happens. You’re going to have things that come along and eat your time, your energy, your attention. Have fights with family, get distracted by good books, go out with friends and talk about the nature of life and the universe – that shit happens. But don’t forget to come back to writing – it does NOT make you a bad writer that you can’t write some days. Just try to show up for the work. If you don’t make it that day, don’t give up.  You’ll still have explosion days, and you’ll still have show up days. I managed to get at least a few words in here and there a day, just to make myself feel connected, and that kept things alive.
  4. Don’t Just Kill Your Darlings, Love Your Detestables: I have often had serious problems appreciating certain kinds of characters in stories. Like weak female. Oh BOY do they make my fingers itch for the slappin’ (listen to me rant about Bella from Twilight for a while or Harley Quinn- whoo boy). Anyway, the problem is, if you try to write a story, the idea is you have to write some of these to round out your stories and if you don’t like them, sometimes you’ll jam up your writing mojo because you’ve got a hate on for your own characters. I did this in my NaNo. There’s a character I wrote in that I wanted to include, a kind of weak woman character and the minute I got to the chapter for her? Bam. Stuck. So… what did I do? I had to learn to love my detestable character. I had to get in there and learn to get into her head and write her in a way that would make her interesting to me while still keeping in the spirit of what I had in mind for her. I had to understand her, get to know her, and in the end? I ended up empathizing with her, getting her where I needed her and it turns out? Making her one of the main villains of my piece! Who knew she had it in her! Still the way she was going to be but now, much more useful and dynamic because she’s not cookie cutter and all because I didn’t let the archtype get in my way anymore.
  5. Just Let it Ride: So after all the stress and craziness, I wandered around some bookstores. I thought about writing, and I came down to the most important thing that was holding me back: I was stressing. I was stressing that I wasn’t good enough, I was having aggita, and had to stop. So what did I do? I just put it aside. I decided that if this book doesn’t matter, if I burn it at the end, if I delete it, if it never sees the light of day, I needed to give it its due. I sat down and let it see the light of day because I promised myself that it deserved its due. It chose me as the vessel by which it was coming out and by God, I was going to let it Ride. So here I am, letting it ride, and to hell with what happens next. Next is editing! Next is second draft! This is the ‘Get the hell out of me you enormous monstrocity!’ part. This is just the Let it Ride. And I will not stress it so much.

So that’s it. Tips that got me through these last two weeks of OMG. Class dismembered. I’m going to soak my fingers, I typed too much today!

The Blinking, Bleeding Frustration-

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial, Writing Update

The biggest problem I can imagine in the world is this:

I have come upon my particular novel, which I am codenaming “Big Pete” for the purposes of this blog, with a purpose I haven’t had in any of my other projects. I have enlisted friends and I have sat down and talked the plot out with them. I have made notes. Gads of notes. And then it occurs to me-

I need to just WRITE.

The size of the project intimidated me so damned much that Big Pete has become this monster, Moby Dick-sized nightmare that I am not sure I can tackle. And the funny part? I am blowing the size of this thing way out of proportion. I’m trying to write a fantasy novel, not give birth to a litter of puppies or climb Everest! It’s a novel! I created it! And my own insecurity is making mountains out of molehills. This isn’t Shakespeare, this is my own creative process, and the size of the project is giving me the screaming willies enough to make me hammer about with this thing on notes and discussions and such-

Where does the actual writing come in?

So I resolved tonight to sit down and come up with the first few words of the book. The book, I decided, had an intro page and I am going to come up with that tonight. I have the idea/layout for the first eight chapters, and I shall tackle those as well. But tonight, I will put down the intro at least, or forever be a horse’s ass about this. It’s just a few words-

So why is this so damn hard?!

Approaching: NaNoWriMo 2008

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial, Writing Update

Two years back I took on the challenge of doing a National Novel Writing Month. That meant attempting, in one month, to write 50,000 words of a novel and getting it knocked out by the deadline. In 2006 I did it with three days to spare, if I remember correctly. In 2007, I did it with two hours to spare, punching out 12,000 words or so of it in one sitting and driving myself to the point of delirium so I didn’t miss the deadline. This year, November’s coming up really quickly and I am literally petrified at the notion of doing this again.

This year is different than last year. Where last year, taking on NaNo was difficult because I had just taken on a new job to which I was just acclimating, this year I have even more work. I am going to school, working, worrying about my future potentially in the police department, and trying to find time to run a full-scale live-action roleplay game and write in my spare time. Call me crazy but that’s a damn full schedule. Oh yes, and I’d like to sleep, eat, and maybe see my friends in between. It hasn’t been a fun ride so far since the semester started and now… NaNo.

I’m by far sure I’m insane for even considering this malarky; adding a deadline of 50,000 words by the end of November to my already hectic work week is not something I’m sure I’m ready for. Yet there is a tradition for me to uphold and frankly, it might drive me to get in more work. So I’m going to give it the old college try. To me, it’s worth kicking in some extra work to make myself meet the deadline. It’s good practice for forcing myself to sit down and write. 

Now if only I knew what the hell I was going to write about this year…

A word on workshops

by Shoshana, posted in Workshop update, Writing Testimonial

If there is something I love and dread more than anything else about trying to be a writer, it is workshops. They are the fodder of the pretentious windbag and the aspiring new Danielle Steele. They are, in fact, the place where you go to find out if your writing is in any way good and instead have to play nice with people whose writing makes you want to claw your own eyeballs out and spill the goo on their papers. 

Case in point is the untitled bit of cynical, jaded New York CRAP that I had to read for class. A young narrator, cryptically arrogant and harmed by the tragedies of his intelligence and the cruelties of a fickle urban world complains about how the world is unfair, not nice, generally sucky, and spends his time ramming creative metaphors about the modern world being equated with filth down the reader’s throats. In the end, the witty windbag narrator goes on and on about the way the world is and never really does ANYTHING in the entire story. A day in the life of a gasbag who complains about other gasbags. 

Welcome to the modern ‘hip’ writers, the jaded and cynical cats and kittens who think that the world is just so ‘over’ that they don’t know how to write about a single happy thing. They are the overly serious, take themselves way too seriously humans who can’t see a ray of light if it came down and singed their nosehairs. They’re the kind who get published in the trendy mags and make the world sound like a dripping, festering sewer full to the brim with happy idiots and only one, miraculously intelligent person: them. They are the sole voice of intellect in a land of foolishness, and they are there to set you free.

Please. PLEASE. Grow up.

You are not the only voice of truth in this world. You are not the only one who has insight. And your jaded, cynical bullshit is not only not fun to read, it has no plot, no purpose, and is much the stuff of a famous quote: all noise and fury and nothing more. And frankly, I’m tired of it. PASS. Go back and find your plot, man, you lost it under all your emo.

Let’s start at the beginning.

by Shoshana, posted in Writing Testimonial

Let me give you a no-bullshit assessment: Being a writer is a disheartening life choice somewhat akin to asking Fate to put you on the Sisyphus jogging team. It blows rocks.

Writers are thick on the ground where I come from in New York. You couldn’t swing a dead feline without hitting one. Everyone’s got a short story, novella, full-length trilogy or movie script tucked away somewhere that they’re just dying to slip under someone’s door. Everyone’s aching to get a shot at the big time. I, sadly, am one of those crazy masses just trying to get something together. My name’s Shoshana Kessock, I’m from Brooklyn New York and if I have anything to say about it, I’m going to get published. This blog is going to follow the process of my grinding away until it happens. 

This wasn’t always going to be my plan. Originally, I wanted to be a police officer or a teacher. Not so strange, when you think about it: I’ve got this hard-on for helping the community and (get ready for the big capitol letters) Making the World A Better Place. This is what I was taught since I was a little girl, that your job is to Make the World A Better Place. What that meant exactly, I never quite understood, but I read a lot of things (mostly comic books) and I thought I knew a basic idea. I wanted to help people out of jams, protect people, that sort of jazz. What I didn’t realize while I was doing all that is that I had a particular talent, you see, for doing that helping people thing in one way: I told stories. I could put together a mean sentence that could inspire, that could bring an idea to light, anything. And while I was slaving away, trying to lose weight to go into the Army (that was part of the whole Be A Cop plan), I was neglecting that little bug that lived in the back of my brain that said write this down, don’t ignore me, you know I’m here, now listen to this story idea and put it down on paper, get out your damn laptop and STOP IGNORING ME-

Anybody who has ever had the writing itch knows what this is. This, ladies and gents, is the writing fever.

It starts when you see something that intrigues you. You think ‘hey, wouldn’t it be great if that happened like this’ and suddenly you’re crafting the start of a whole tale. Now, if you’re anybody else but a writer, you put it aside, you run it through a quick fantasy, and that’s that. If you’ve got the writing fever, that itch? Then it just sits there and gnaws at you. Your eyes glaze over and suddenly, you’re gone and thinking about a whole world of ideas and if you could just get them down on paper, then what would it turn into? If you don’t get it out on paper, you tell a friend. Or you blog about it, in modern day, or you put it up on YouTube or you just forget about it. If you’ve got the itch real bad, sometimes that won’t do it. Sometimes, it will just keep gnawing until you have an outlet and the idea has been given birth to and then its gone.

That’s what being a writer is like for me.

Here’s what that does to my life. I work at a part-time job while going to college full time. I also run a role-playing game (yes, I’m a gamer, so that gives me an outlet) and try to have a social life. When the itch comes, sometimes I can’t write, because I’m too busy (classes, work, whatever) and then? Then it starts to get annoying. And if I don’t do it for long enough because I have to go vacuum or go to the gym, it starts to actually be more than annoying. It starts to get downright irritating and then I don’t know how to describe it. It feels like, to steal a term from Stephen King, like my brain is ready to do the junkie jive. So I suppose you’d say that to me, being a writer is like what I imagine being a junkie is like. You get it out there, you write, and by God you have to, because these ideas won’t stop.

I didn’t write for a long time. I didn’t have the stones for it. Rejection is a bitch, ladies and germs, and I didn’t like the notion of having to put myself up there to get pot-shots tossed my way. But I couldn’t stop writing. I would start short stories and stop. I would come up with novel ideas and toss them aside. Then, on a whim, I took a writing class and… yikes, the floodgates just about killed the hoover dam in my brain and out it all has started to come. I’ve got more ideas than I know what to do with.

Now? Now, I’m serious about it. I’ve done things like the NaNoWriMo writing challenge two years running and pumped out stories that were, while not my best writing, good practice. I’ve taken more writing classes and I’ve started talking to people at conventions (gamer conventions are great places to meet people). I’m taking advice where I can and getting my stuff together. And this time… I know what I gotta do.

No matter what, I gotta write. I don’t care if it means staying up late, not going to that movie with friends, or cramping up my hands due to typing too much, I’ve got ideas that just need to get out of my brain and onto paper. And so this blog is born. I’m going to chronicle what I’m up to, what I’m working on, and what I’ve bee doing to drive myself onward. I want this blog to be an inspiration for me when at the end of the day, when I’m discouraged or just plain tired of all of it, that it was worth it. I’m going to keep working and this blog is going to remind me of why.

Because in the end, I want to see my work in print. Because I might not get to be a police officer (that’s still up in the air) and I might not be a teacher or someone who saves the world, but I’m going to write something that somewhere, touches someone in a good way. I’m going to write something that gives someone a good time at the end of a sucky day of work. I’m going to do this because these characters are alive in my brain and they want out into the world to say hello. I’ve got dozens of them, hundreds maybe, and I’m going to let them come out and say hello. Because while writers may be a dime a dozen? I’m going to quote an author that I adore, Jim Butcher, who said that being a writer is like being chased by a bear. You don’t have to be the fastest one, you just have to be faster than the other guy. I don’t have to be better than the authors out there, I just have to be better than the guys around me who want to be authors. I just have to Do Something. 

Because, in the mathematics of my brain, when I Do Something I can get to my goal and maybe Make the World a Better Place in some small way. That’s my goal.

So welcome to my brain. Step over the old plate of cookies, don’t trip on the cat, and come on in.

– Shoshana Kessock /  Summer 2008