Rain, rain, don’t go away…for once you picked the perfect day.
The pool is great and all, along with the sunshine that comes with it, but I have a goal to reach this weekend, and it will only make it harder to reach if I’m forced to stay outside all day, or all weekend. My mom says it won’t stop raining until I get an A in econ, which means it will stop on July 24th, because I’ve given up trying to get an A in that class. To do that, I would have to give up writing. And that would kill me.
I’m at #15 now in the stats, if you were wondering (which, to be honest, you probably weren’t). By the time you go look, if you do at all, it will probably have changed. Or not. I’m starting to get really close to winning—I’m at a bit over 37,000 words. I didn’t get much writing done yesterday, only the stuff I wrote while I was at school, because I got preoccupied with Homewood Days and Marley.
I’m not going to lie: I’m pretty much over our town’s anuualsummer festival. All we did when we went was wave to the occasional passerby, tell Kelli she couldn’t buy a bow and arrow, and try to figure out what we were going to do after we left. It was okay, going with a group of friends and all, but it was also extremely boring. And the nasty heavy metal band hurt my ears and scarred me for life.
That’s not singing. It’s screaming into a microphone.
But Marley & Me, as always, was a great movie. I still sobbed at the end, like I always do. It’s one of those movies that never gets old, no matter how many times you watch it. I’ve seen it at least five times, and I still laughed. The fun thing about seeing a movie so many times is that you pick up all the little things you missed the first or second time. Sometimes they aren’t even important, but it’s still fun.
I think I promised you a blog entry about cookies. So not talking about cookies would be disappointing.
Evie makes these chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies that are just amazing! She makes them all the time, and when I go over there I always end up eating too many and gaining half a pound. They’re also Colleen’s favorite snack food to have at Op
erations, the ultra-slumber parties we have with our group of galfriends. They’re almost addicting…that’s how good they taste. We don’t call them triple-chocolate-whatever cookies. We call them Evie’s cookies.
If you think about it, there aren’t many types of chocolate-chip-y cookies that don’t taste good. Cookies in general are pretty much amazing no matter what kind they are. You could probably argue that easily, but that’s not my point. Just ask the Cookie Monster. He’ll tear your hair out if you tell him you don’t like cookies. Well, not really, because he’s a nice, kid-friendly monster. Just don’t ever follow him into a dark alley.
Speaking of Evie-darling (I think we were, a paragraph or so up), I’m happy to report that she has fallen completely in love with the story my book is telling. Even Colleen didn’t mind speed-reading through the first chapter while she was over yesterday. She liked it enough that chapters one through thirty are now stored on her flash drive, so I guess I already have a couple dedicated fans to start me off.
I’m not the type of person that wants to be an author, and that’s it. That’s not what I want. After reading Meg Cabot’s blog entries and really thinking about it, it’s become clear to me how unrealistic being a successful author really is. It’s not an easy market. In most cases, to even get someone to look at your manuscript, you have to get a literary agent—and a good one, not one that’s after your money.
And then there’s that period of rejection, where you could spend months, or even years, pulling rejection letters out of your mailbox.
I mentioned that I’m not the type of person who just wants to be a published author. I’m also not the kind of person that would give up trying if I got rejected a million times. Just ask anyone who knows me: I can be a stubborn little bratt. I’m not the best writer in the world, but then again I’m not even seventeen yet. There’s still (I hope) plenty of time to improve.
I still remember my very first attempt at writing a full-length book: Silent Conversations. If I still had that document, I would totally show you a piece of it. It was awful. Of course, I was barely fourteen, a freshman in high school, and hadn’t entered Mr. Wall’s creative writing class yet. So the fact that the people I gave it to could barely finish it—or, in Colleen’s case, couldn’t finish it at all—is completely understandable.
The thing with writing, though, is that you can’t just quit when you’ve written something crappy (and yes, my first attempt was crap with one-inch margins and 16-point font). After I wrote that book, and after my excitement wore off and I realized how terrible it was, I did a re-write. After that book came a sequel, which I called Faith. It was a sweet story, about the rewards God can give when one is faithful through storms, but still not that great of a book. I wrote it the summer before my sophomore year.
I explain all this in more detail here.
The bottom line is, with every story and every “novel,” I got better and better. There were some projects that I couldn’t finish (in these cases, the plotlines were too complicated for my brain to process at the time I was trying to write them), but there’s nothing wrong with that. Those experiences taught me that, if an idea is good enough, let it sit in your brain for awhile. When it’s ready to come out, let it. Don’t rush to start on a new project every single time an idea pops into your head. If you do that, you’ll never finish anything. Just like with anything else, the only way you can get better is by practicing.
There are, of course, a few lucky people who get published, obtain fans, and even get to meet their dedicated readers. You never know, as a writer, if that’s where your life is headed. The best thing you can do is be practical. Go to college and get a degree. Go to another college and get a master’s degree in something you love. Writing novels doesn’t start out making you a living. Having a job you love is the most important thing. Who knows: you may even decide that writing on the side is all you want to do.
It’s an unpredictable road, but having faith in your own abilities will guide you. Remember: anyone who tells you your dream career is unachievable is only cranky because they gave up theirs. Don’t be like them! Shoot for the stars.
Love&hugs, Meg♥
