Currently, These Are Pipe Dreams

Lately I've been wondering who I really am. I haven't written in a while because, truth be told, I've been drowning in stress and had no reserves to draw from to put towards anything else. But I've also been wondering if I'll ever really make anything of myself anyway.

I think often about this dream I have of writing books. This dream...this dream...this pipe dream.

Yes, I often think it's a pipe dream. Because every time I sit down and try to write a book I fail. I stare at a blank page. I have nothing in my head. It's like a white, hollow room that just echoes behind my eyeballs and then suddenly goes black.

I'm not sure what the problem is and, after more than a decade of trying to figure it out, I'm starting to get tired of making an effort. Currently my only explanation is that I'm just not cut out to be a working writer. Maybe not anymore, maybe not ever, maybe I never was.

Maybe I can write poetry and that will be enough. I mean I enjoy writing poetry, at least when I have some mojo left over from my day to put pen to paper, but I can't buy groceries with poetry. I can't survive on poetry. I can't make a career out of poetry.

Honestly, the only way I can eat and be a (non-business) writer is to write best-selling fiction or a really badass nonfiction book that somehow hits people's souls. And I just don't know that I can do either one of those things. In fact, I feel pretty convinced lately that I can't.

So I find myself wondering this: if I just write for the sake of writing, and if it's not my career or my identity, then what the hell should I be doing with my time? Should I be working whatever random, good paying job comes along so that I can buy food and pay rent and take a few trips, but that doesn't really fulfill me? (Current life situation.)

I'm wondering if I just don't have a dream anymore to sustain me. If I've just given up on the idea entirely, or if I've failed enough at it that I've resigned myself to pursuing other interests. Or, maybe, my terror of being poor again overwhelms my desire to create meaning where there currently is none.

So here I am. I'm 35 (for just under four more months) and I'm completely and utterly lost again! I've stopped working through my Artist's Way program just because of stress, landlord issues, house issues, health problems, elderly cat health problems, and a number of other obligations. I suppose I could get back to it. But lately I find myself saying, "What's the point? Is there a point?"

I wish I could find my sweet spot, where I'd get paid to write in whatever way I'm talented at in writing (what is that again?). But right now I'm a little despondent. I don't think it's there. I just don't. And I don't know where to look next.

How Many Rewrites Should I Do?

So I read something interesting the other day in a book about writing poetry, which was incidentally written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. It was an ok book (probably prose isn't her thing, but the publishers thought it would be a fabulous, money-making idea). The thing that I found most interesting was a line towards end where she wrote something like the following:

Some poems need to be revised 500 times.

Now if you're like me, you look at that sort of statement (and perhaps spit out your beverage) and the first thing you say to yourself is, "What?! That's crazy." And then after that, you say to yourself, "If that's really true...well hell, what's the point then?"

A lot of writers wonder how many rewrites they should do. I'm one of those also. And as such, I look for advice from "successful" writers (I write that in quotes because really, success is subjective) to try to guide me along.

But when I read that statement about the 500 rewrites, it was perhaps the first time in my life that I vehemently disagreed with something stated about the craft of writing. Or, more likely, it was the first time in my life that I allowed myself to really disagree with an idea from someone who was supposed to be an erudite writer.

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, "The first draft of anything is shit." And I subscribed to this notion for a really long time. In fact I still think it's true probably 75% of the time.

But the other 25%? Honestly sometimes I think the first draft of something (a paragraph, a sketch, a musical composition) can be brilliance.

I'm still working my way through The Artist's Way and part of its teachings are that you don't really "create" creativity. What you do, in actuality, is harness the creative thoughts and ideas that already exist out there in the ether somewhere. You grab them and channel them down onto the page or into your painting.

And when I think about it this way, then my 75/25 model sort of makes sense. Because I think 75% of the time we get in our own way. We stifle ourselves. We drown out the voice within that perhaps is the voice of God or energy or whatever it is you believe in that is greater than yourself.

But I think 25% of the time we are in the zone. We have tuned in to channel "Universe" and we pick up our brush or our pen or our guitar and we simply document what we hear in our heads. And in that scenario, the stuff that comes out is pretty close to perfect. Just the way it is.

In my own writing life I find that I have moments of brilliance. A portion of what I write is actually pretty badass from the start. It's only a portion, yes, but it exists. And in that case is the first draft really shit? Do I really need to do a bunch of rewrites on something that came straight from my internal radio?

The rest of the time, yep, it's shit. And I usually know it. And it's beyond a fear or ego sort of thing where I'm afraid that it's bad. Sometimes I just read it and I know in my psyche (or my soul?) that it's not all that great.

But here's the kicker and what I've found to be true in my own work. Every piece of junk has a little diamond in it somewhere. It's that part of what you created that was pulled from your radio, unfiltered by your brain. I think you should look for that part in anything you create and use it to try to tune back in. To figure out the rest of what you missed.

So how many rewrites should you do? It depends. How tuned in were you?

Sometimes Who You Are Can Be Surprising

So I've been writing every day for the last month or so, like I said I was going to do in my last post about committing yourself to doing the work. Now I haven't written in this blog during that time, but that's because I've been going through this strange and interesting process of discovering who I am and what I am actually inclined to do.

And I've found it all to be a bit...surprising.

I was an English major in college. I focused on literature (not teaching, not creative writing - just books. And no, I didn't know what I was going to do with that degree). My degree plan required me to take a creative writing class in order to graduate. Just one, no big deal. Except that it was a big deal to me because I hadn't really done any creative writing up to that point.

(Well, unless you count the story I'd tried to write about my cat on the word processor when I was about 8 years old. I'd failed miserably in that single endeavor, typing out approximately two pages of prose describing the back of my house, the garage, and how black my cat was. The end.)

So from that point on I'd decided I had no talent for creative writing. A fateful decision, perhaps, but we can't rewind our lives.

It was my junior year of college when I signed up for the poetry writing class. The circumstances around why I chose this particular class escape me, but I feel like it was because I didn't know how to write anything longer than a poem. Or because the idea of trying to do so was sort of terrifying.

Part of the experience of college is loving some classes, hating others, and having the rest fall somewhere in the middle. Up to that point (and honestly, after that point too) I hadn't particularly liked poetry. It fell somewhere in the middle because I just couldn't get into them. A lot of the ones I had to read were dark and twisted like an old oak tree in a cemetery. Some of them were indecipherable gibberish and I was left with a scrunched face, wondering what the hell I'd even read. Ok, lots of them were indecipherable gibberish.

And then there was Sylvia Plath, who'd killed herself by sticking her head in the oven.

Anywhoo...

I worked hard and did the best work I knew how to do, but the poetry class didn't go well for me. It turned out my professor didn't like anything I wrote. In fact, he hated my work. Hated it so much that with each poetry submission, he'd bring my poem to class and stick it on the overhead projector as an example of what not to write.

Can you imagine how that felt? Not good, I tell you.

I eventually grew tired of being the class guinea pig, scheduled a conference with him, and finished out the semester. But the experience left a bitter, ugly taste in my mouth that has probably stifled me for more than a decade. I think I became even more convinced that my 8-year-old brain was correct in its initial assessment of my (lack of) talent.

Hindsight is an interesting thing, though. You get older, you begin to understand yourself more, and you learn some things about the human condition. And you start to wonder what's really going on in a person's brain when they feel the need to single you out and put a dunce hat on your head. After all, his poetry was extra dark and twisted. His wife had also hung herself from the ceiling fan.

Over the course of my work through The Artist's Way I've pummeled through the baggage left over from that experience. And I've decided that, 15 years later, his feelings about my work don't matter anymore. And just around the time I was coming to that realization, I discovered that I was writing poetry at night.

I didn't really set out to do it. In fact, I just said I'd get myself a notebook for when I wanted to write but didn't want to stare into the light of the computer. So I bought said notebook (a nice black one that has a soft cover), put it on my nightstand, and proceeded to ignore it for several weeks. And then I picked it up randomly while I was listening to some music and I wrote something. I didn't consider it poetry, it was just something that came out of my brain.

And then the next night I wrote another one of those somethings. And the next night, another one. And as I flipped the pages and examined my work several days later, I asked an interesting question of myself: "Am I writing poetry?"

I thought that perhaps I was, but I needed confirmation, you know. So I went to the bookstore's poetry section and Mary Oliver's books leaped off of the shelf and into my palms (The Artist's Way tells me this is synchronicity in action). I skimmed quickly and realized that her words were like mine. They were poems. The book said so, and she said she was a poet, and, well, she'd won that little thing called The Pulitzer Prize for her words. So I must be writing poetry.

Huh.

And so I've begun walking down a new path. I've also reached back through time to see if there were any hidden signs I'd missed. And indeed there were. I was surprised to find that I've actually been writing poetry for many years in my personal blog, although I'd never thought of those writings as such. And believe me, for someone who says she's always hated poetry, this is a flabbergasting discovery. But I'm exploring it.

So the lesson to take from this long-winded post is that if you simply let yourself be, if you stop forcing yourself, if you just do what feels nice...perhaps you'll discover you're actually someone you never thought you were. And if it goes the way my experience has gone, you'll find that it reignites the fire in your life and excites you in ways that you'd forgotten about. Ways that you hadn't experienced since you were a kid.

And isn't that nice?

The First Step Is Committing Yourself to Doing the Work

My newest resolution is to write every day, and to spend most of that time focusing on a creative outlet (not on emotional vomit blog posts, for example). Which is probably what I should've been doing all along if I wanted to be a creative writer, to be honest. But that's ok. Better late than never as the saying goes.

I've been doing pretty well over the last week. I'm now beginning week three of The Artist's Way and I've made some pretty good strides in overcoming some of my personal obstacles. I think that me actually doing any sort of creative work is a huge indicator of progress because I usually can't do anything at all. It's that damn cement wall I have inside of me. All of the creative stuff has been behind it for decades and I keep waiting for it to crack.

I'm starting to gain a bit of momentum now. The negative voices in my head are becoming more of a din, more quiet, less powerful I think. I'm no longer having to fight so hard to turn off the "this sucks, why are you even bothering?" kind of dialogue that often swirls around when I try to write. And I started the whole process by just committing myself to writing.

It was a decision I made one day to create a private blog as space for writing practice, and to disallow any negative self-judgment of any kind. The first post was a painful writing session where I felt like my fingers were moving in slow motion across the keys, unable to produce much of anything, and I sensed a dark blob of frustration filling my chest and expanding into my ribs and throat. Meanwhile the voices in my head roared behind iron bars, trying to get to me, trying to escape. But I kept them locked there and I finished the (very short) piece I had set out to do.

The next time it was a little easier. And the time after that, easier still. I suspect it will continue to get easier as I go - as long as I remain committed to just doing it.

My current long-term goal is to start working on my next novel in August. I'm going to sit down and do the work after we come back from our cruise, when I will have some good uninterrupted time to just focus on getting a story out of my head. Until then I'm taking small steps to map out scenes and plot elements, that way when I get to August I'll be fully ready to do the work.

So perhaps that's my biggest lesson from the past three weeks as I continue my quest to unblock my writer's block: that I can't do anything if I don't commit to just doing it, regardless of the voices in my head. And it's not easy. It's also not something that I don't already know deep inside. I guess it's just taken me years (decades) to get to a place where I'm ready to push through the roadblocks and put words on paper.

Something I read in The Artist's Way last night said (and this is a paraphrase, I'm not a kick-ass memorizer) that artists should expect periods of growth and periods of stagnation. That the process is often one step forward and a few steps back, so we should learn to think of the barren periods as resting time.

Resting time. I like that.

I'm still growing, I've just been resting for the last six months.

The Autobiographical Nature of Writing

I've discovered something recently that I think most people less blocked than me have long ago realized: that most writing is autobiographical in nature. Maybe not fully autobiographical (or maybe it is, for some) but in the sense that bits and pieces have been taken from our lives and strung together into whatever story flows onto the page.

I started thinking about why this is the case, and here is what I came up with so far:

• We can only write about things we know. Even mystical worlds are based on some sort of reality that we have witnessed, or that has inspired our vision.
• We often write to make sense of life. This includes events in our own lives, in the lives of those around us, or in the lives of people halfway across the world.
• We likely write from a divine source. I feel like anything that is being channeled through us as inspiration would, by default, have to be based on some sort of experience (perhaps a spiritual one).

I was sitting here tonight talking to God, which I do from time to time. I was asking him why this, why that, why so much suffering, why so much pain. Why was I even born. (Yeah, I was crying for a little while.)

And then I asked whatever is up there, for the third time this week, to help me do something with all of it so that my existence could have some meaning. Please make the suffering have a reason, I said with my mind's voice to the dark sky above. Please let me do something with it, please let it not all be for naught, please help me.

I sat quietly (the best way to sit if you want to really hear) and I wondered how I could channel everything into my writing. And then I started thinking about Isabella.

Isabella is both a character and a title that I came up with many years ago for a novel. She is fully formed in my mind and has been from the start, although the story around her has been fuzzy. She is very much like me, in fact, which is not surprising. She has brown hair with gentle curls that fall around her face. She is inquisitive. She is smart. She is shy.

She is an orphan.

While sitting in the quiet, talking to God, asking how to make sense of everything....I suddenly found Isabella's story. I'd been waiting for years for it to come to me. I knew she existed but I didn't know why, or what she would be doing.

I think, finally...FINALLY...I know.

Will it be autobiographical? Of course! To a point. Isn't everything autobiographical in some way? See my explanation above, lest you've forgotten my logic already.

In fact, it will be something I know (I'm not an orphan, but I have felt like one many times in my life), it will help me make sense of my life and the actions of others around me, and it will help me grasp at answers to my questions. Answers that will have to come from the infinite universe, or God, because I don't have those answers yet.

In the past I would not allow myself to base any of my "creations" on my own reality or on anyone else's. I know it's sort of silly, and perhaps this is why I've been blocked for so long, but I thought doing so would mean I'm not authentic enough or creative enough.

And, friends please listen to me, this is such a fallacy. Nothing is new. Nothing in the entire universe is new! Everything is recycled.

Every. Story. Out. There. Is. Recycled.

Every love story has been told. Every adventure story has been told. Every mystery has been told and/or solved. Every adventure - real or fictional - has been thought of even if never written down. My life or some version of it has been repeated before and will be repeated again. It is the nature of our existence as humans.

And all of these things are the only sources of inspiration we have for our stories, for our art, for our music, for our poetry. Where else would the inspiration come from? It has to come from our experiences, whether they are material experiences or spiritual experiences.

I'm grateful for the progress I've made in the last week in unblocking my writer's block. I'm continuing to work my way through The Artist's Way and have committed myself to practicing creative writing on a daily (or at least an every other day) basis. I'm very pleased to see that something is finally shifting with this particular story idea. I'm extra pleased to see that when I was begging the universe for some sort of answer tonight, I found something to grasp onto.

Sometimes You Should Write Crap

Tonight I committed myself to writing crap. Because if I don't write crap, how will I ever write something that's non-crap?

I decided to start a new blog to use exclusively for this experience, since writing by hand can't keep up with my speeding brain once I get going. It's a private blog and only available for my eyes, so don't go looking for it out of morbid curiosity. I'll save the train wreck reading experience for myself.

Most artists (it seems) have a litany of random pieces of work - both finished and unfinished - that never see the light of day. So I figured I ought to have some of those by now. Er, some more of those by now (I already have three unfinished books).

I do have a drawer full of journals, but I don't really think journaling counts (especially since I journal, like, thrice yearly these days). But when I journal I'm not being creative or trying to connect with a special part of myself that I want to share. I'm pretty much documenting my day or bitching about some aspect of my life journey.

Hence the new (private) blog. It will be specifically used for my art and to create as much crap as I possibly can. And you know what? I already created my first piece of crap tonight. I called it "Firefly" because I saw some fireflies at the park and I wanted to write about that experience.

So I sat down, started typing, and found that I didn't really have much to say when it came down to it. I find this happens quite often, and I usually become very discouraged and resign myself to being a failure forever (italics are for added drama). But this time I fought actively to not let my brain go there. I told myself to keep writing, even if the words I was typing already looked like absolute crap.

And that's a good thing, because when I was done with the ultra short piece I'd written, I noticed there were a couple of good sentences nestled in there. I read them and said to myself, "Huh, well that sentence isn't bad at all." And maybe if I keep on with it, over time I'll get more good sentences and less crap.

It seems like this week has been transformative in that I've decided that my work is not mine. Because is it really? Everything I do and everything I am is controlled by something larger than myself. So my goal now is to just get out of the way. To write the crap so that the good stuff can come out, and to stop focusing on it being crap.

The crap is mine. It's what's blocking the good stuff from coming out. And the good stuff belongs to a higher power.

Well, at least that's the path I'm going to follow for now. And by now, I mean tomorrow. Because it's late and it's time to go read a book!

If We Don't Start Valuing Artists, We Won't Have Any

As a wannabe artist, an artist in training, a master of procrastination artist (etc. and so on), I feel like I can talk candidly on the subject of art. Well maybe I can and maybe I can't, but I'm going to write down my thoughts anyway.

Last week Prince died. If you haven't heard the news by now then you've been living under a rock. I was deeply affected by his death, just like many people around the world. And also like many people around the world, I've spent some time the past few days watching YouTube interviews and live performances, or listening to his music, or looking at his pictures. Anything to try to reconnect with the soul that flew so suddenly away.

When I watch his interviews, one of the subjects he comments on repeatedly is the state of the music industry. The thing is, I feel like he says (said) out loud what needs to be said about not only music but about all art forms: That the state of things isn't good.

As a writer I am almost equally affected by the state of the "business" every day, because with Kindle and ebooks (not to mention offshoring to India or the Philippines where people will work for $1/hour), the writing business is going the way of the music business - FREE.

And free sucks.

Prince - that is, the worldwide musician that we knew -  was only able to be this person because once upon a time, someone valued him as an artist. Once upon a time, someone figured out how talented he was and subsequently paid him decent money for his art. This allowed him to continue to spin his creative juices, to grow as an artist, to positively affect the lives of millions of people, and to do so without the threat of foreclosure or starvation in his personal life.

Today? A new talent would sign away their creations to the guys in the suits, be used as a puppet to make the "business" as much money as possible, and then set out to pasture. Isn't it a wonder that we still have artists at all?

I hope that when I'm old and gray there will be some artists and writers and musicians and painters around to admire. You know, people who have achieved worldwide recognition for the gifts they bestow on humanity. I fear that as long as people don't want to invest in artists, the artists will push their art to the side while they do the jobs that help them pay bills and take care of their families. Because this is what I do every day.

And you know what that means?

It means that people like Prince are a dying breed. That art, as a whole, is on its way out. And whatever that means for society, well, I don't think it's a good thing. Because the best art is transformative. It helps us all along on our journeys through the ups and downs of life, the triumphs and the disappointments, the wins and the loses, the new babies and the sudden goodbyes.

Artists are the gatekeepers, the traffic cops, the teachers, the elders. And right now I see a massive pileup at the end of the road.

Sometimes You Need a Nudge

I went to see my counselor today (I'm not ashamed to say I see a counselor when I need to). Ain't nuthin' wrong with helpin' yo-self! We talked about a number of things, of course, but one of those things was my writing.

I'm about 95% of the way through my final edits and rewrites on my book. But I stopped. I told my editor I couldn't go the rest of the way, and then I went and hung my head in shame, slid the old print copies of the manuscript into the recycle bin, and closed the files on my computer for a while.

I was convinced that I was just too afraid to continue. I mean, now that I was so close to the finish line, what if I failed? What if I was no good? What if I splatted on my face in front of all of humanity? But I don't think that's what's going on, really. And it was my counselor and my editor who both helped me to figure this out.

I was told to prioritize my life, to write down the things that are most important to me right now and to see what the top five are. And the idea was that if I did that, I might find that the book was just not as high up on the priority list as I would want it to be, or expect it to be, or hope it would be. And that was ok. It was just a list, and the list would change.

And this was step one. Because the truth was, when I thought about that list, it was true. I was struggling with my health after my two surgeries (that was priority #1). I was overwhelmed by work (priority #2). I was suffocating in general (priorities 3 through 10). And I had nothing left to devote to my writing.

So I decided it would be ok to let the book be, because it wasn't high enough on the list. I also decided I would quit my yoga teaching gig, because it was subtracting happiness from my life rather than adding it. And then I breathed a sigh of relief at having let steam out of the pressure cooker and I moved on.

But I was disappointed, for sure. And questioning whether or not I really wanted to be a writer. I sure am flaky, aren't I? I describe myself as someone who works at a slow toil. Maybe I should say glacial toil.

And then my counselor said to me, "Anyone would be afraid to put a piece of themselves out there. That's natural. But the truth is that when the time is right, you'll overcome it and move forward anyway. Take a break, but don't stop writing." Or something like that. She always says the best stuff.

The point I was to remember was that fear is not what's stopping me from completing my book. I'm just taking a break. I'm taking a break because I have a lot going on. And taking a break is ok.

Taking a break is ok.

And here I am writing again. I guess because I feel less like a coward and more like a writer who is just taking a break, which kind of sparked my creativity again. I suppose it was the nudge I needed. We'll see how far the nudge takes me.

When Bills Get In Your Way

I'm having a struggle right now between paying bills and living my purpose. What's a writer to do? I know, I know, "Write in your spare time, get up early and write, write on the weekends!" That's what people like to say and that's what some people like to do. The trouble is, it doesn't work that way for everybody.

For me, my creativity and motivation are completely sapped out when my work life becomes overwhelming, under-stimulating, or invasive. I'm sort of in that spot right now. Plus, you know, I need "free time" that doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer. That means I want to read, to spend time with loved ones, or to go outside when I'm not working or writing stuff for other people. My first thought after a long day isn't to go back to my computer to pound out more words on the keyboard.

I keep telling myself that "someday" I'll be able to work less at my day job, and then I can focus more on my personal writing. Or at least focus more on the things that most interest me - but that seem to pay shit. But then the reality is that life keeps getting more expensive by the year. I'd like a home of my own someday, and I want to travel, and there are medical bills to pay.

And every year I have to work a little bit harder to try to keep up with the rising costs. Which means I can't truly follow my passions unless I want to physically live in a ramshackle closet. I'll figure it out, though. I know I will.

I was reading an article in a magazine last night about why people pursue goals for years or for decades. The author said that it gives them something to come back to. A constant. A sense of purpose that sort of runs beneath the surface of their daily lives like a centuries-old groundwater supply. And I suppose that's what my current book project has turned into. My sense of purpose that I keep coming back to.

Although I can't help but wish that I could have my cake and eat it, too. You know, be able to do the type of writing I want to do but still be able to live a comfortable life. I suppose that's never been the reality for most artists throughout the course of time, but I wonder if it's getting even harder today? Or maybe I'm just looking for an explanation that doesn't exist.

Tomorrow I will write. And if not then, well, I'll write the next day. And if I don't have the time when the next day comes, I'll write the next week.

I just hope I don't run out of days.

Writing? Pay Attention to What Excites You

So I was on a work trip last week (somehow, some way, somebody wants to pay me to do photography for them) and I pulled out my Mac during my last night in the hotel. And I decided to work on this story idea I'd come up with while I was recovering from surgery. It was one of those middle-of-the-night, random ideas that bubbled to the surface while my conscious brain was too sick to get in the way.

And as I started writing, I realized that this character may not be one that an adult would care much about. In fact, upon further thought, this character isn't someone created for adults. Indeed, I think I'm writing a book for a middle school audience.

And when I figured this out I sort of got really excited about it. Well, not sort of...I did. Because all of a sudden I had a flash of ideas in my brain, I could see the possibilities for the character and the storyline(s), and I wasn't struggling with finding a direction in the same way that I had with my last fiction book attempt.

Over the next few days I started doing research into writing children's books. I don't think it's a coincidence that I'd ordered a book on this very subject a few weeks prior. Sometimes the universe is funny like that. It knows where you're going before you do.

Anyway, I looked up different organizations related to children's books and publishing, and I had this moment where I stumbled upon a list of kids' books on one of the websites. And in that moment my heart leaped and a smile formed itself on my face. I was excited.

Back at the turn of 2010 I was a school teacher for a year, and what I loved best about teaching was when I got to have conversations with my kids about life lessons. (Yes, I also really loved teaching them how to write, but I really REALLY loved teaching them how to be human beings.) I didn't have kids at the time, so it was nice to have an outlet to help these children move into adolescence.

I'm 35 years old now, my uterus has been stitched together in multiple places during a recent surgery, and it looks like kids are not in the cards for me. And I've been feeling some sort of way about that. About not being able to help my child, or any child, have a better life than I was subjected to.

But what if...what if!...I could help the other children in this world through my writing?

I remember this lovely book called Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I read it several times when I was a young girl, and I remember that it had a positive effect on my life. It answered questions that I had, it taught me to navigate social relationships, and it helped me to not feel so alone. Could I do that for someone else?

Right now I've decided to really pay attention to my feelings, because the idea of being a children's book author excites me in a new and vibrant way. It feels like writing books for young adults is something I can actually do. Like, in the same way I feel like I can write kick ass marketing copy or IT documentation. So I'm going to follow it and see where it goes.