Spent the day just chilling out, which was a nice feeling. I’m glad I never attended any conventions before I sold my first book, though. Too overwhelming, and too much advice—most of which would probably have just hindered me. You don’t have to go to a workshop to learn how to write from the gut. Going to a workshop won’t teach you how to finish writing that masterpiece, either. All the tools you need, with some exceptions, are already inside you.
Oh, but here’s something that Annie Dillard says: “No one can help you if you’re stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you see the work’s possibilities. In every work, there’s an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later—some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with.”
Personally, I think the same thing can be said about one’s own life. No one can help you when you’re trying to figure yourself out—what you want, if this is the path for you—because there isn’t a single person in the world who will see your life and its possibilities in the way you can. No one will ever love your own wild potential as much as you do, yourself. And yes, there will be impossible roadblocks—but there will also be ways around them, if you set your mind to it. All that matters is how much you want it. How far you’re willing to go to keep believing.
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I revamped the website, which is basically the same, with just a few tweaks.
And this is cool: Dorchester and Wildside are teaming together to “showcase works by best selling classic and award winning contemporary authors,” which in the past have included “Lawrence Watt-Evans, Alan Dean Foster, Robert E. Howard, Anne McCaffrey, and Robert Silverberg.”