𝑨𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝑾𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈

My Own Path

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

Writing over the years, for me anyway, is very much like first getting married. I’ve only been married the one time, but, in the beginning, as it was when we first started dating, there was this exhilaration about the world. It wasn’t just about us, but the world reflected our glowing faces. It’s been 49 years, and it just keeps getting better.

Once you are married, there is a period of time as you get accustomed to each other that never happens while dating or even living together before marriage. That time varies with people. On average, I’d say it’s a good three years.

After that, or perhaps before that, reality hits. You go back to work or school if that’s what you were doing beforehand. Maybe you relocate, which just by itself is another adjustment to take into account. Maybe you start a family and find your time divided between a job or career and a new baby.

The real get down to brass tacks with marriage happens, I think, after that seven-year mark. Remember Marilyn Monroe in the Seven Year Itch? It’s seven years.

Writing was a longer journey for me. In school, I got the bug, like it was an illness that might pass on eventually. I never aspired to actually write for a living; that was too artsy-fartsy in my father’s eyes. To him, I was either going to be a housewife, eventually a mother, and that was it. However, bra burning happened in the 1960s, and women began to aspire to other things. Of course, teachers and nurses were always there for those women who couldn’t manage to catch themselves a husband. Possibly the military, though he didn’t recommend it.

Meanwhile, at school, I continued to enjoy my English classes. I did get to take a year of typing in high school, which was the thing that allowed me to enter the workforce. Who knew that class would help me more than Home Economics did?

That’s my life. Sort of. At least the points I want to bring up in this article. The time it takes to adjust to things.

When my husband and I got married, I found a person who supported me in my writing. He is a writer too.

For my writing, there was no serious writing until I was in my early thirties. For years, I’d been telling people that someday I was going to write a book. It was a good conversation starter, much better than talking about the weather. But one day, I asked myself when I was going to write that book. I thought to myself, “How much longer are you going to bore people with you’re going to someday write a book?”

That’s when I started to write. It also coincided with yet another new job, a secretarial/clerical sort of position. I hadn’t gone to much college and had never trained for any sort of job. I knew I couldn’t be a waitress because, sure as shooting, I would drop an armful of plates all over the floor. Interestingly, years later, it was discovered that I have outwardly focusing eyes and have had them since I was a kid. It wasn’t until just now, as I am writing, that I paired the two things together.

When children can’t catch balls, this is a clue. Unfortunately, I went through my childhood unable to catch balls while getting constantly beaned on the head. It’s like the ball is coming at you from the direction you think it is coming from, but, in reality, it’s going to smack you in the head from a few degrees away. Nobody wanted me on their team. Also, even into my adulthood, people enjoyed tossing keys and things like that to me, only to see me not able to catch them. I also flinched a lot. The solution is two-fold; you can get prisms in your eyeglass lenses, and you can do exercises to strengthen your eyes by holding your finger a foot in front of your nose and forcing your eyes to focus on it as you bring it nearer to your face.

Anyway, for the next three years, I wrote. It was everything I wanted to read at the time, but couldn’t find. In those days, we read from books. Kindle hadn’t been invented yet. So, it was a swashbuckling adventure, romance with New Age overtones. I still have a couple of copies of it in the house. My mother read it and pronounced it good. Nobody else did. I think my niece might have been impressed with it. She spiral-bound a copy of it for me. At the end of that time of writing and 82,000 words later, I declared myself a writer and quit my job.

Right. That worked well.

For the next one and a half years, I struggled with writer’s block. This is where the advice not to quit your day job is so good. In order to get to the root of the problem with my writer’s block, I began writing in a journal. I chanced upon a book called “Creating Money” by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer. Somewhere I heard about it and asked my husband if it would be okay for me to purchase a copy. He said, “You don’t need to. It’s right here.” He turned and plucked it off one of our bookshelves. By the way, it does work, but not in the way you might expect it to. This was my further introduction to things metaphysical.

That book led to another they had written, “Opening to Channel”. I also did Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” book.

In retrospect, I see that year and a half of unemployment as the best spent years of my life. Eventually, my old job called me to say the lady they had hired to replace me was quitting, and asked if I would come in for a few weeks to cover until they found a replacement for me to train. I didn’t leave again until I eventually retired almost twenty years later.

I continued to write in my journal. Nothing beyond that. During those years, I was trying to learn how to be a psychic channel. It took a while, but I eventually did it. I had hoped that I might hang out my shingle and do psychic readings for people. I did train a couple of people to be psychic channels. They took all of fifteen minutes. It took me over five years to learn.

I continued to work at my day job through all of this psychic development. By that time, we needed the income. Our employment situation, over the years, has never been stable. Yes, sometimes there was lots of money. More often than not, there was not. My husband and I never had children, so the responsibility of an extended family was never ours to bear. He is also a writer, and so we continued with our writerly occupations. His is paid and mine is not paid. At least, not yet.

It wasn’t until I retired that I fell into the path of being an online writer. I still remember those days when I submitted my novel to publishing houses. The etiquette of the day was that you sent off a query letter, and if anybody was in a biting mood, they would send you permission to send them your manuscript. I decided I would fast-track myself and send the book over the transom, hoping somebody would read it, picking it out from the other thousands of books from their slush piles. This is also why I don’t play the lottery.

You were not allowed to send the book off to more than one publisher at a time. That was considered rude publishing behavior. It might still be, for all I know. It took several months from waiting in line at the post office to mail off the manuscript to finally receiving your rejection letter. I believe I spent about 18 months doing that.

Now, I plan to self-publish on Amazon. Self-publishing requires a whole new skill set of designing and publishing skills that I still have not mastered.

In any event, after I retired, I discovered Medium.com and later Substack.com, places where I could publish online to my heart’s content. That started in late 2021, so as of the date of my writing this, it’s been about three and a half years.

I also spent time developing some books. I would start them in November with the NaNoWriMo.org program. This is the National Novel Writing Month, a contest where you try to write 50,000 words in a month. Over the years, I don’t know how many NaNos I participated in, having won some and lost more. The idea, though, was to get me accustomed to writing more than I had been; to push my writing output. Three of the books were about finding work since I’ve had so many jobs in my lifetime, and one was about learning how to be a psychic channel. None have been published. For some reason, I just never finished them completely. Also, I need to develop those last skills of how to publish without the benefit of an agent, editor, or copy editor.

There were no prizes for the annual contest, just bragging rights.

I have no idea if there will be a NaNoWriMo contest in November 2025. Time will tell if the organization comes back from the horrible demise it experienced last year. There was grooming going on with some of the younger writers. Not good business practices for any company.

But there is nothing that prevents anybody from creating their own challenges. Lately, I’ve been keeping track of what I write, YouTube scripts, my journal writing, some specialized documents that may or may not eventually turn into something, and my articles at Medium and SubStack. I aim for 2,000 words a day. Sometimes I make it, other times I don’t. As of last night, the 22^nd of May, I had 40,833 words written, a good 6,000 past the goal of 2,000 words a day.

One challenge I undertook long before I ever heard of NaNoWriMo was to write a million words in one year. Ray Bradbury had suggested it in his book, “Zen of Writing”. I did that and more. I wrote 1.4 million words in my journal that year, so I know I can do it.

At the age of 69, I can say that for me, this path of becoming a writer has been a long one. It’s been an enjoyable one, though. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun in my life.

Words of advice? Consider it all grist for the mill. Wield coffee cups that declare you are a writer. Write every single day. Write against yourself and concoct challenges for yourself. Believe that you are a writer even when nobody seems to be reading what you’ve written. Learn. Go into therapy and learn some more.

Thanks for reading this. If you’d like to see more of what I write, please subscribe.

Love,

𝑷𝒂𝒖𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒆 𝑬𝒗𝒂𝒏𝒐𝒔𝒌𝒚