Getting There

What would it be like to be a published author? To see your cover for the first time? To hold the real thing in your hands, and open the pages, and smell them while you flip through and get all nerdy-excited that IT SMELLS LIKE A REAL BOOK! What would it be like to receive an email from a reader that thanks you for writing it? What would it be like to win an award, or be nominated for one, or sit at a table and sign copies until your hand hurt?

These are the things I most often wonder right before I go to bed. I imagine how awesome it'd be, how surreal, how too-good-to-be-true. I imagine having the career of my dreams- one that allows me to live at home with my family in a home that I own and travel because I am being paid to do my favorite type of art.

Still, just ask any published author, and they'll tell you. "It's not all glamour. It's hard work, and things that you don't expect happen all the time, and it can get really upsetting at times."

There are other things to consider about becoming an author besides signings and events and advances and covers. There's tough edits, and deadlines. There's bad reviews, and there's REALLY bad reviews, and there's small advances, and there's the possibility that the book will be a flop and make it really hard to ever sell another, there's the possibility that you'll get the fuzzy end of the lollipop and end up hating books forever and ever and ldfkja;dflkajdfkajdfakjdfa.

Oh, authorly problems. I dream of having those, too. Haha! A writer friend of mine recently said that if I got published, the one star reviews would hurt a lot more than I'm anticipating. That's probably true, but at the moment all I can think about is, "Someone I DON'T KNOW read MY BOOK and had EMOTIONS stirred up to the point that they had to COME ONLINE AND RAGE ABOUT IT?!" Fuckin' boss!

I've noticed lately that I've stopped posting blogs that voiced my fears and wants when it comes to being a writer. When I first started out, I held nothing back. I didn't have an agent, or a baby, or any idea what I was actually doing besides having fun and following my dream. Whenever I look to the first few posts of this blog I trip out. I've changed so much, my life has changed, and so has my writing, but the dream is the exact same.

If I could somehow go back and tell The Amy of 2009 anything in the world, it would be that publishing is slow, and that her writing needed a lot of work and that she really, REALLY needed to accept the fact that it would probably take a handful books before she saw one on the shelves. I would have told her that it'd be a long journey, one that took extreme amounts of focus and dedication (the one thing that her OCD would make easier,) and that she'd need to learn to roll by the punches and allow herself to get better. That Amy would have been kind of bummed. Insanely bummed, actually.

But then I'd hug her and give her a high five, because her overly-ambitious attitude and stubborn tendency to NEVER give up would be what scored her an awesome NYC literary agent that encouraged and supported her, and the opportunity for both her and Edmund to work at home as freelance writers and stay with The Squidling.

At this point, Past Amy would probably die over the fact that Future Amy refers to her daughter as The Squidling. But that is neither here nor there.

So, anyway. Reading all my old posts inspired me to allow myself to open up a little bit more, even if I feel nervous or sick to my stomach at the idea of creating a potential in-depth chronicle of failure. Because, if it goes right.....

Well. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.