Starting Out

When I say "starting out" we all know that I mean more than one thing. On the one hand this is my inaugural blog post for my inaugural blog. Beginnings, and all that. On the other hand, starting out is everything this blog is supposed to stand for. I'm writing for the people here who want to become authors, but aren't. For all of those people who want to be published regularly, who want respectable advances for their stories and novels; those people who want agents and novels and film adaptations, who want name recognition, but who don't have any of it. Or for those of us who have our heads a little bit closer to our shoulders and just want to write, to be published, and to do it without getting laughed at (unless, you know, you're writing for laughs).

So I'm writing it for all of those people. And I am one of those people. I am desperately one of those people. So I'm writing it for myself as well.

One of the hardest things about finding my way to being the kind of author that we want to be is that I have only ever had the examples of people who had already done it. Whether these were authors whose blogs I read or whose interviews I watch, or professors who were teaching me to write, or even family friends, these were all people who could only ever tell me things like "well, when I was starting out." And no matter how hard it was for them to get there, it always seems like it was too easy. And it seems that way because they did make it, and I haven't, and there is an infinite gap between the two.

Even if it's not quite as infinite as all that in real life.

What I needed, though, was somebody who was going through the process, and who I could see going through the process. Somebody who was doing what I was doing, who I could match a pace with and see that I wasn't just floating off in my own strange direction.

Now, that is the person that I am going to be for anybody reading this. And I can take solace in the fact that anybody reading this will be that kind of person for me. And I think this way, riding each other's backs, we can get somewhere.

I will be careful to update this blog for you no less than once every three days, letting you know where I've come from and what I'm doing. When I get better with html, I will customize the layout so things look nicer around here. I will also make e-mail available and do my best to respond when and if they do come in. I hope that everybody enjoys what I'm doing, because I take this seriously. And that's also the point, isn't it? We're getting serious about what we're doing, however long it takes, because we don't want to be "starting out" forever.