Working the Dream Job
The last three posts dove into what I feel is a critical identity crisis in our culture that leads to handling purpose incorrectly. We either shy from it as soon as it gets hard, believing it must not be for us. Or we dive in so hard we burnout and wonder why it didn’t pan out as expected.
I see this a lot with writers. I’ve had my own seasons of doing nothing or trying to determine what I should write. The whole publishing desire proved confusing, daunting, and unattainable for a long time. Some of my first attempts were before we had all this ease of the Internet to share things. You had to type or print your manuscript, box it well, and snail mail it. I took a sci-fi and fantasy writing course in high school by snail mail.
The worse thing an English teacher did to me was throw me in with a big wig from Ballantine, who came to our book fair, when I had no idea how to pitch my writing. Then again, that might have been a good thing. I started falling on my face and learning early.
However, I went through over a decade of not learning how to improve my writing or understanding of the industry after college. I kept writing, but some of it turned into things for D&D campaigns and others were in a cabinet full of binders and notebooks. I probably have eighty percent of what I wrote from thirteen to thirty-five in some format, despite all the moves and computers I went through. Only one thing since then is lost, though I could check my printouts again to be sure.
It’s a good thing I kept it all. I could pull out ideas and use them in the writing course I took with the Christian Writers Guild. It was an overview of all kinds of writing. It improved my writing, but did not help me figure out the publishing world. I moved on to learn from Jerry Jenkins and his Your Novel Blueprint course. This proved an eye opener and helped me a lot with my writing. I tried pitching the Christian romance I wrote in the course, but figured out I had two books in one. I have yet to figure out what I want to do with those ideas. I even tried another story about a major drought in the mid-West that rivaled that of the 1930s, which started with the bus exercise in the course.
Then life hit and I fell into a writing slump. Even the amateur gaming magazine I wrote for hit a slump as things changed to people wanting more video than reading material. We also shrunk in the size of who wanted to write, so keeping up with the game releases we wrote about became daunting. I enjoyed the experience while I had it and had some articles with thousands of readers. I think my how-to’s for Black Desert Online when it first came out and my fan fiction for Elder Scrolls Online did the best. It’s where I grew an appreciation of making sure you know your audience.
I found 2017 to 2020 a very frustrating time in life. Oddly, things took a turn for the better because of Covid for my husband and I. We got a lot sorted out in 2020 amongst all the insanity, angst, and politics. It was a hard year with several losses of friends and uncertainty around what we still had to work through. This led to me writing a dystopian serial story called Cataclysm. So unoriginal in title, I know. It was the first thing I had written over 40K words since my time with the Your Novel Blueprint class. You can find it on my Tales of Karnum and Beyond blog dedicated to my fiction writing. I share it to show where my head and heart were at in 2020 and it is open for commenting.
I finally went to my first writer’s conference in 2021 virtually. It was the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference (BRMCWC). There I met a lot of great people thanks to a great host to keep us virtual attendees in the loop and meeting each other on Zoom meetings. I joined the 540 Community, and it is my favorite of all my writing communities, even if I enjoy the others. From there, I learned of a writing contest, entered a novel I had drafted in 2008 into it after tons of editing, and won in their speculative contest. That led to a richer understanding of the publishing industry and more improvements to my writing. I closed out 2021 feeling like I had found my identity and purpose as a writer.
2022 turned into a whirlwind of pitching my novel, attending Realm Makers virtually (my next favorite large group), and even more learning on how to improve my skills. By the end of 2022, with a lot of input from several communities, classes, and research, I decided to try self publishing. My novel, Champions of Light, which won the contest, went through quite a few more editing passes and transformations for the world building and characters before I put it on Amazon on June 6, 2023.
I also got serious about my Tales of Karnum and Beyond blog around the release. Both An Abundant Life and Tales of Karnum and Beyond have organically grown as I networked with fellow writers and readers.
I have a small niche carved out and I keep reaching out to find more people to share with. This has led to swapping books for beta and advanced copies for reading. I also added a book review section to Tales of Karnum and Beyond as a third place to put reviews of everything I read. I just need to find time to read more around all my writing fun. Reading helps me learn the craft, too.
Book two, Truth Bearer, comes out this Wednesday, February 14th. I already had fans of book one, Champions of Light, asking about the next book’s progress for the last few months. I can assure everyone that book three is in progress.
I have plans to add more to Tales of Karnum and Beyond around writing book three. My An Abundant Life blog will continue to be a free weekly. We shall see where this all leads to and I thank you, my loyal readers, for keeping me inspired to do so.
And I said all of that to share how I made my way from dreaming about being an author to making it into my dream job. The dream job side is still in progress as I find my way, but it’s been worth the 40 years plus of learning, trying and working. I have plenty more to learn and know I can improve how I do things.
Do not give up on your dreams. If God placed it in your heart and you have peace in knowing you should do it, then you will overcome all the obstacles by finding the right teachers, resources, and support. Remember, the biggest part is tons of practice. The first thing you write or create will not be what you sell to the public. It may be quite a few tries before the right one hits, or it may be an overhaul of an old idea like my Champions of Light. Never give up, though it is good to take a few breathers to assess things along the way.