The Long and Winding Road of Today's Writing Career

I finally got my epic fantasy in final draft form, and I feel wonderful about it.

I have been writing that story since I was fifteen years old. I've written about 4 different full manuscripts of it. This particular version makes me very proud, and I'm resting on it. It is such a good feeling to get this project out of my head and into peoples' hands. Beta readers have come back with overwhelmingly positive feedback already, too. And all I can do other than that is

Submit. Submit. Submit.

My goal right now for this project is to do one submission per day. I end up doing about 2 per week instead. Stuff happens.

I'm currently working on another project that I have already finished multiple times. A story about emotional healing, romance and the Monarch Butterfly migration. I love it. This second version has lots of drastic changes--I changed the gender of my main character, for instance, and the entire setup changes as well. It's pretty funny. Going back to it with a fresh perspective after taming the behemoth of the epic fantasy, I'm chuckling a lot and pretty happy with it.

I'm a good writer. I believe I can accept that as truth now, without being accused of undue pride or whatever. I'm not a perfect writer, and I definitely need a lot of refining process to get my books in shape, but I think I write stories people like. It's nice, and important, to know that.

In the end, no matter who wants or doesn't want my stories, I guess the point is, I'm a writer anyway. I write because I love it.

After I get Butterfly Years off my plate, I'm going to go ahead and start a new project. Something sweet and fanciful and funny and fun and shorter and less epic than my other projects. Something more marketable. I figure another thing I can do to sell my epic fantasy is, sell something marketable first. So..... on to that facet of trying to accomplish my goals. In the meantime, keep submitting the epic fantasy, and hopefully find an LDS publisher for the LDS contemporary.

I read somewhere that writers nowadays can expect their writing careers to take several unexpected turns, and to have to "start over" several times. I'm experiencing that. I've published two novels and won the Whitney award, and now here I am with nearly three finished manuscripts, and unsure if I have a place for them.

I think that patience is a big huge piece of the process. Patience and diligence and continued work on honing craft, trying new ideas, and putting yourself out there. It feels exhausting at times, but everything in my life is exhausting so that's not really anything new :) the nice thing is, just about everything in my life is also incredibly fulfilling.