Becoming a Writer

I've written since I was 6 years old.  From the very first time I wrote "The End," I knew from the urge to jump on every piece of furniture in the house that I'd found my calling.   So why is, that now, at 35 years old, I finally consider myself a writer?

Mindset.

I wrote as a child, driven by the seat of my pants, for years.  I finished two handwritten novels when I was 13.  I knew, I knew that writing was my future. 

And then life interfered. 

My parents separated when I was 14.  Our family split apart, with my father and baby brother moving one direction, my mother and I staying put and my older brother on his own path.  I was in pain and I couldn't see out of it.  Though I still wrote for myself, I'd lost the drive I felt at such a young age.  In my teens, writing became something that just helped me stop from drowning.  It was personal, internal and too painful to consider a reality.

In my twenties, I stopped writing.  I'd lost the connection to my emotions, and how can one write emotion when you won't allow yourself to feel it?  I still recall the day I sat and thought about how long it had been since I'd written a single story.  I was twenty-nine, and the last time I had sat down to write, I had been 20.  Nine years.  Years that I'd disconnected myself from the things that brought me the most joy and satisfaction – writing, playing the piano.  Because in order to stop the pain, I'd stopped the other emotions as well.

So that day, I looked in the mirror.  And I mean, truly looked.  I stared at the woman I'd become, and sadly wondered what had happened to the young girl who'd been told she was too nice by her friends.  I wondered what happened to the young girl who felt in the tips of her toes that writing was her calling.  Instead, I'd become sarcastic.  I'd become closed.  And I still hurt.  

I didn't like her.  I didn't want people to comment on my biting sarcasm.  I wanted the girl back who smiled when someone called her nice.  I wanted to be nice again.  It was a deciding moment for me, for I choose who I wanted to be.  A year later,  I could finally look in the mirror and say, I like you.

And from there, life opened up for me.  I met and married the wonderful man who is my husband.  We had a beautiful child.  And I wrote.  I started anew, with a brand new outlook, ideas and all the belief and excitement I'd felt as a young girl.  I knew I had a lot to learn, and so I studied. I joined critique groups and used my first novel as an adult as a learning tool.   I wrote, rewrote and revised until I had a basic grasp of the skill of writing a romance novel.  And then I kept writing.

This past August, after five years of writing, rewriting and devoting myself to simply learning all I could, I finished that novel.  And yet still, I didn't feel like a writer.  I was ecstatic, excited and relieved (and a little sad), but writing was just something I did when I had time.  I would not have defined myself as a writer or my career as writing. 

Then, the Golden Heart contest opened for entries and while I was working on polishing my novel, I decided to enter.  It was the push I needed to focus and complete my revisions.  It was the push I needed to write the query, to finally work on the synopsis.   And it gave me the push I needed to send those queries out.  And even then, I didn't feel like a writer.  Even then, I would not have defined my career as a writer.

I received two responses from my queries – one asking for more and one saying, 'No thank you.'  It took the combination of those two queries to sit at my computer and feel like a writer.   It took the validity of proof that writing was a business, and I had just made it my business. 

So now…if you ask me what my career is, if you ask me who and what I am…I will tell you this:  My name is Jeannie, I'm a mother, a wife, and a writer.  

And that, my friends, is a very good day indeed.

Status Quo:

Something About Her Queries: 9 sent

1 rejection, 1 request for partial (yay!), and 7 unreplied still