A treasured colleague recently told me, “I usually like it when I got a crisis moment…it energizes me.”

I won’t disagree; crisis or rifts can mean upcoming change, though not always positive and productive. But even after the storm, we do eventually experience a calm, a reprieve.

But it’s been raining in my writing life for a while now. This crisis ‘moment’ has been unending and maddening. Frankly, I had a lower-than-low self-reflection:

I’m probably not a writer. Maybe I never was.

It’s only now letting up into a drizzle, and I do believe I’m catching glimpses of the blue sky in the cracks in the clouds now.

I am thirty-one. My life is nowhere near where I pictured it being when I was a naïve teenager with college pamphlets telling me in all caps lettering: BE ANYTHING YOU WANT! THE FUTURE IS YOURS TO CREATE!

Let’s call that tidbit for what it is: a load of BS.

And so were a lot of my writing aspirations. However, I have to be honest about this to you just as I need to be brutally honest about it to myself:

My aspirations were not to be a great writer. They were to be a bestselling author with book tours, crowded signings, and fan bases worldwide. I read James Patterson’s Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment in eighth grade and thought, “I can do that.” I devoured fantasy novels, fictional tales of magic, heroic underdogs vanquishing malignant villains and forces, solving mysteries, etc, etc. Every book, I always thought, “Yeah, I could write something like that.”

I have done some things like that. I have my self-published works via Amazon, do my yearly October shorts and readings. I have written, which is an amazing thing to say.

I wasn’t writing for the ‘good’ reasons to write. Another book explained this: if you’re doing it for the fame and fortune, you’re going to be very let down. But if you do it for the sake of doing it, you’ll be happier.

I won’t pretend that I still don’t feel a pang of jealous when I see authors who are well-established. I know a few personally who are considered ‘bestsellers’ and have to stop myself from badgering them with the questions. I’m fairly certain the first point is to write your work, edit it until it bleeds, and then get it out there.

So I’m starting over in a sense. No, not from scratch; I need the shorts, the novellas, the self-published items to remain in view. I need to remember where I’ve been, but I need a new destination to work towards. If a table with a signing happens to be there, then great. If not, I need to be okay with that.

I’ve already started on a few new projects; one fleshed out character who I aim to set on her merry way, a few ideas/flash ideas in a notebook at hand, and writing the things I’m not supposed to talk about in poetry.

So here’s to the crisis; hopefully the end of this one.

Let me know what you want to read, especially on here: Curious Characters, shorts, poems, and/or all of the above?

Stay safe out there and keep reading (and writing).