I must say that I'm enjoying sharing writing and stories with other people. I am loving getting links to industry blogs and things like that. I've even started to follow two (yes just two) myself.
The fact that I'm even following two is a huge deal to me. There's a lot of talk sometimes when people discuss literature or publishing that makes me nervous. I think it's that artist within me, the one that refuses to become a sell out, but also secretly wishes we could make a living doing something like this. Because then we could do what ever we wanted and write it off as a learning experience that would be helpful to the craft. A trip to Hawaii would them become an awesome tax write off. (Okay, I'm sure it's not that simple, but my mind is more than half in the clouds most of the time and only recently became infused with a little more reality.)
It can only be a good thing to learn about all aspects of something you'd like to do. Know what to expect and know what to do, and, if you can, make some connections while you're at it. Discussing it can't be all bad either, pondering the significance of the way things are, the way they can be, literature versus genre, levels of snobbishness, etc.
But I don't like it. Talk about categorization makes me particularly nervous. I rally against them, my one cause in a world I am very much not a part of. And secretly, I think it's because I don't know where I fit in, and also because I don't like the idea of fitting in somewhere.
Which is weird, in a way, I guess. Wouldn't it be best to know where you fit? To know that there are others out there like you toiling away at the same kind of story? Don't most people want to connect and find their community, find those other people so they can share and compare experiences and ideas?
And I find that, no, I don't like any of that. It's not that I need to be special or unique. It's that I don't like being pigeon holed. If you have something that's sci-fi, then there will be people who will say, "No, you can't do this and you can't do that." Or worse, people will say you "shouldn't" do this and you "should" do that. This is the stuff I don't like. This is where I feel issues can crop up.
And there's also the fact that I am just slightly anti-social. Things like talking about games, I'm perfectly fine with that. Talking about my writing though is completely different. I still don't talk about it out loud. It just feels weird. I don't talk about characters or story lines, and I don't ask questions unless I'm doing some bit of research or something and someone else knows more about something than me.
Maybe it's just me, but reading about all this stuff seems to make me put strange pressures on myself or makes me feel like I'm not a serious writer because I'm not more involved and because the one really good story (well, stories really, but world story) I'm throwing out as a Sims story which is categorized with a stamp that says "not serious at all."
So I can't help wondering what I'm doing and what do I plan to do. My head has all sorts of questions she turns over constantly, but then my gut (the voice of reason oddly) pets my head and says, "trust me." She whispers that thinking is bad, and I need to stay away from bad influences. And that I need to just write.
Just write, get it all out without thinking or worrying about things that I really don't care about at the moment. Just keep doing what I do without worrying about what's been done (unless we're completely stealing someone else's idea).
And when the time is right, we'll know what to do. If I manage to make a product that I one day want to sell, then I need to trust in myself and my abilities. For the past ten years, I've been working in retail. Six of those years, I was a gift shop girl who had to learn how to make sales pitches. And over this past year, I've had use that skill making sales pitches to sell apartments to possible tenants and to sell possible good tenants to management.
Seriously, I know how to sell things, and I know how to sell myself. Oh, that sounds bad, like I'm selling out or something. What I mean is that I have trust and faith in myself. Even on the bad days when I hate myself or hate my writing, I know that those moods will pass, and I will continue doing what I've always liked to do.
