It feels like a long time since I last sat down to write a blog post! It was only two weeks ago, but it feels so much longer. Yes, I seem to have accidently taken a week off last week; I had every intention of writing a post, but it never happened. Instead, I’ve been busy with ‘book stuff’ instead.
The entire idea of having a published book is still a fairly new thing to me, and so I feel like even though I’m going through the motions to get to that goal, I am just winging it and learning as I go.
For as long as I can remember I described being an author as ‘the dream’, but I never pursued it; I never thought I could. Which is strange to think about really, because I don’t tend to limit myself in anything, if I want to give it a try, I generally do. Which makes this process a bit more daunting because I never thought I’d get here.
It’s funny actually, as I write that I get that Spongebob meme in my mind where Plankton is saying ‘I don’t know. I never thought I’d get this far.’ Which is actually an image I used to describe how I felt beginning my Foundation Degree in Counselling. So maybe this is just how I feel about everything: I expect to fail, it’s all a bit of surprise really.
I’ve always loved writing, thinking of stories and building characters. When I was a child my friends would be drawing and I would be writing at great lengths characters and stories I wanted to write. But I never actually managed to finish anything, and so I thought I was incapable of ever finishing something; and that remained true until last year.
I come from a family where if we want to do something, we don’t learn how to do it before hand, we start it and figure it out as we go, and this is completely what I’m doing with writing. I had an idea, so I made some notes, them notes got too much so I put them in order, then the notes in order got bigger and before I knew it I was sat with a finished story thinking ‘what next?’.
I concluded the next stage would be proof read it approximately ten thousand times and then ask others to read it. To get feedback and to add to it, making it the best it can be: The beta reader stage.
As this is my first go at anything of this sort, I decided that sharing the blurb on my Facebook page and asking if anyone might want to help me out, would be a good start. So last week, that is finally what I plucked up the courage to do.
I feel like from the outside, it looks easy. “Yeah, she just put the blub on Facebook and got a few readers.” But my goodness, I wish it had been that easy!
It took weeks to build up the courage to even put my blurb into a picture that I could upload. I even nearly uploaded it a few times before I gained the confidence to press POST and share it with my followers.
The thing is, it’s my world. A world that has become my safe place for the last year and a half. I’ve spoken about how my world was turned upside down whilst I’ve been writing it, and I would (and still do) retreat to it to feel safe again. The characters aren’t just characters in a book, they’re the only friends I’ve been able to see every day through the pandemic, and they’re the only piece of stability I’ve had while my real world went a bit crazy.
When my life has felt so unsure, the one thing that has been sure is them. My characters and my story. And now I’m sharing that safe place with other people, and that’s really scary.
Of course, I’m a worse-case-scenario kind of girl, so my mind leaps to the conclusions that the beta readers might hate the plot, hate the characters, and think my writing is terrible. So naturally, I decided I needed to reread the entire thing to settle my mind before sending it off to my new readers; I gave myself three days. Three days to read the entire thing and make any corrections that needed to be made. Three days where I was working my day job too may I add, so every spare second, I had my eyes glued to my phone or tablet reading it all over.
Doing this definitely helped settle my worrying mind as there were parts that made me feel excited, parts that made me feel deep sadness and even parts I had forgotten about! It feels big headed to say, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it all over again.
Although I still worry deep down about all the ‘what ifs’, but I think I’m ready to let it stretch it’s legs in someone else’s mind and hope for the best.
I always remember at the start of one of my college years, there was a day of activities we all had to take part in. I suppose it was to make friends, but painfully shy me spoke to no body all day, and to make it worse the girls I was in a group with didn’t want to take part in any of the activities. (They were too bothered about their hair going curly in the rain) One of the activities was a leap of faith, in which we had to climb up this thirty foot poll and leap off the top, letting your peers hold on to the rope your harness was attached to.
Sharing my book feels much like that.
I’m stood at the top of the leap, wobbling about, terrified. And my beta readers and friends are the people at the bottom who are deciding on whether to catch me or let me hit the ground. When I make the leap, it will be when I am sending my story off to publishers, and that thought is so scary right now, but one thing at a time; lets decide whether I can make the leap at all first!
So, this is it. I’m in the next stage of what-ever-this-is, waiting to see if it’s safe to jump or not. Weather it’s safe or not, I’ll jump one day anyway, because I’ve come this far, I can’t turn back now!
Gwen Richards 