Just Keep Writing

It's IWSG Wednesday, our friend Alex Cavanaugh's brainchild wherein writers help other writers.  It's an amazing group, and if you want to read more participants, click here.  The ninja captain requested we include our bios this month, along with our IWSG posts.  Here's mine: 

I'm pretty sure I write from my bones.  Now a freelance writer, blogger and developing fiction writer, I spent a lifetime in the corporate world before a job elimination forced a long awaited change in priorities.  The next morning, words broke out and I've never looked back.  My freelance articles and essays have appeared in Boston Globe Magazine, South Shore Living, Adoptive Families Magazine and Writersdigest.com and I'm currently querying a novel. 

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I’m not a resolution girl.  I don’t make them, not out loud anyway.  I prefer private goals, being superstitious enough to think if people hear (or read) me say something, I’ll fail. Which leads me to formulate rather ordinary words for my first IWSG post of 2015.  Things like, keep plugging.  Get up every day and plan to write and stick to the plan.  

Admittedly, it's not much.  But if you are looking for more, Writer's Digest posted fifty essays that might offer assistance, and perhaps, inspiration.  I will say this out loud and in print.  I'm planning on reading them all.

50 Articles on Writing to Help You in 2015  

 Happy New Year.  Shall we make it a good one?

  

Loaded and Almost Ready

It's a new month in a new year and time for IWSG.  Happy New Year to you all.  To read posts from other participants, click here.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been what you’d call a late bloomer.  I failed to gain any confidence of note until I entered college.  Still lacking self-assurance, post graduation I jumped from one under-challenging administrative role to another. 

Five years into this merry-go-round, a boss in the national corporation I'd joined, offered me a promotion.  This put me on an unexpected growth path and a rhythm developed.  I’d work in my new role for three or four years and though I wasn’t looking for it, they’d promote me again.  I’d be scared to accept the new responsibility...in truth once to tears, but each time I stepped into the new position, I’d come to understand I already knew how to perform in the job.  After repeating this cycle a couple of times, I actually sought out a promotion.  That time, an offer was extended to an external candidate, and of course, that hurt.  But when she left within the year, they popped me into the vacancy and progress continued.  After a long period in this steady growth environment, I ended up in a solid, middle management position in which I excelled, and a message sunk in.  Put your head down, work hard and success will come.  Ask for it though, and it might not.

So here I am today.  For the last four years, in my methodical way, I’ve written my brains out.   One novel sits in the proverbial drawer.  After several reader critiques, the revision process on my second novel is nearly complete.   Currently, it undergoes extensive editing by someone whose opinion I value more than any other…my husband, Mr. AP English.  Once I input his changes, the manuscript will be as good as I know how to make it.  I’ve written a solid draft of a query letter.  I’m digging through Publisher’s Marketplace.  

In short, I am pretty darn close. 

This time however, it’s up to me to muscle myself up to the next level.  No one is going to come looking for it.  The book is never going to get out there unless I take steps to make it happen.  Like the little engine; I think I can, I think I can, even though my stomach turns inside out when I contemplate the size of the hill in front of me. 

Metaphors aside, it’s getting close to trigger time. What has it all been for, if I don't try?  

That's why I'm calling 2013, "The Year of the Risk."