IWSG- November

 It's the first Wednesday of the month so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group.

Our IWSG hosts this month are Jennifer Lane, Jenni Enzor, Renee Scattergood, Rebecca Douglass, Lynn Bradshaw, and Melissa Maygrove!

This month's question is a goodie!

When you began writing, what did you imagine your life as a writer would be like? Were you right, or has this experience presented you with some surprises along the way?

When I first started writing seriously, I was a teenager.  A young teenager.  I pictured myself getting published and becoming a bestseller before I was 20, my films being made into successful movies and my life in the lap of luxury beginning.

Guess what?

It didn't happen.

This was back in the days before email, so sending off a manuscript, especially from Australia or New Zealand, was a massive undertaking.  Paper weighs a lot and the decision had to be made whether to send the package by air or sea.  I entered contests, sent manuscripts direct to publishers and surprise, surprise, I never heard anything back.  I got a bit discouraged and stopped writing for a while, but by the time I was in college, I was back at it.

And I never really stopped.

Fast forward to the early 2000s and things changed.  I joined an online writing group and suddenly had a fabulous group of critique partners and a community of other authors who were also striving to be published.  They pushed me to be a better writer, encouraged me to branch out and write things outside of my comfort zone.  I wrote and published a large number of short stories with this group encouraging me, and when a bunch of us decided we were ready to move onto novels, we started a new group to focus on that.

We queried and consoled one another as the rejections rolled in, rejoiced together when someone got a partial or full request, and celebrated hard when one after another, people started getting what we all dreamed of: agent representation and publishing contracts.

Yet, despite having published six novels to date, my writing career looks nothing like what I imagined as a teenager.

I'm not a bestseller.   My books get great reviews, but very few people buy them.  If I get enough money in a quarterly royalty check to buy a coffee, it's cause for celebration.  Hollywood isn't beating down my door to adapt my books.  And I'm sure not living in the lap of luxury. 

I have two day jobs to keep afloat and have to squeeze writing time out of what little leisure time that leaves me. I had an agent for a few years, but lost that partnership when she left the agency.  So, I'm back in the query trenches, hoping for an opportunity to publish the next book with a publisher with greater reach than the one I'm currently with.

So, I guess it's safe to say my writing career is nothing like what I expected.  There's been a lot more disappointments than highlights, a lot more rejection than I ever thought I'd face and a lot less personal connection with people in the publishing industry.

But despite all that, I keep writing.  I keep querying.  I keep publishing.  I keep hoping that one day I'll get that one 'yes' that will transform my writing career into what 14-year-old me always beleived it would be.