Getting Down To It

In my meeting with Leah, she said my next step was to get down to it, to get down to the business of writing. "All the obstacles are out of the way, and now it's time for business," she told me. And while I know she is right, the actual "getting down to business" feels confusing.

Where do I begin?

The writing part isn't hard. It's the other part, the publishing part. Her advice was to learn as much as I could about the publishing business, to spend the time I would normally use for writing as a time for research because, as she said, "it's all part of being a writer, the writing and the selling of it."

So yesterday I spent an hour reading about publishing online. There are a plethora of resources and all of them pretty much say the same thing: Find your market, write query letters, and send out your stuff. Sounds simple, but it feels daunting in many ways.

During my MFA program, we had countless classes and guest speakers who gave us advice on how to "crack the code" of publishing. While I listened intently, I was also struck by the fact that a lot of the people in our program who'd published were friends with other published writers who in turn, recommended them to publishers and agents. This sort of "old boys network" turned my stomach, so I shied away from understanding it and instead focused on my writing.

I find myself doing that again. Leah tells me it is because I am in search of obstacles that will convince me I cannot write, that I am not a writer. She says that "blaming the system" is a way to avoid confronting my fears and until I confront them, I'll keep coming up with excuses. I know she's right in many ways, but still, the more I read yesterday about "Getting Published" the more overwhelming it all felt.

I have many friends who have published, but in my head I say, "Yes, they are REAL writers." This is another of my obstacle-creations as Leah would say and as long as I keep creating them, the more I will not get published.

Another prominent obstacle for me is to rise above it all and say, "I don't really want to get published. I just want to write." In it's own way, that loftier-than-thou argument is a more powerful obstacle than the daunting caverns of the publishing world. When I use this argument, I appear above it all and in my exalted position, I can convince myself that, even though I write well enough, I don't need validation from "them" to feel good about myself and my writing.

It's all bullshit, of course. Leah didn't use such words, she's much more eloquently articulate than that, but it was the brunt of her message. Leah is the kind of person who uses words like manifest and universe and can make them sound normal and every day, like we all have the power to manifest our dreams by surrendering to the universe of our dreams.

Okay, she doesn't sound that cheesy, but she does make me believe that the choices I've made so far are choices driven by my instinct and no so much about shoulds and should-nots. Learning to trust my instincts has been a life-long struggle, but she's right in many regards. Lately my instincts have been right on. While I'm learning to trust them more and more, I still have a hard time believing them when it comes to my writing and the business of publishing my writing.

Sometimes it's hard to know the obstacles from the truth.

Meanwhile, Ann is back in battle mode having dug her way through her cluttered classroom yesterday (summer remodeling happened much to her dismay) and is back in the thick of it today with meetings and planning. I'm trying not to rub it in that she's teaching and I'm not, but yesterday while she was slogging away in her classroom, I was feeling something very powerful -- the weightlessness of my life.

This might sound like a bad thing, but I can't tell you how much joy I felt yesterday, my day off, to be able to move through the day without any worries of class lists, faculty meetings, or curriculum planning hanging like a demon above my head. Always my days off in the past have been burdened with this guilt, the kind of guilt that whispers You shouldn't be playing. You should be working. You shouldn't be relaxing. You should be working.

And even though I work an 8 hour shift this afternoon and evening, there is no extraneous weight compelling me to "work at work" on my hours off from work. There is simply the dog to walk, the breakfast dishes to wash, a shower to take, a lunch to make, and time to write...

...and learn about the demon of publishing.