Silence for ages and then two posts within a day? Whatever next? As I sit here listening to the sounds of my cat scratching at the window (I’m sure I just let her in!) I’m aware that what I’m pondering is tantamount to a news years resolution, I’m planning my journey, but I will continue on nonetheless.
One thing I’ve always been good at is procrastination, another thing is dreaming. The two not being mutually exclusive, obviously. I know what I want for my life, it has many pathways, many routes and could lead me in many different directions, or, if I could just pull everything together, it could lead to one carefully laid out path. One of those routes involves my writing, I’ve loved to write since I can remember, I don’t know when it started, it’s just always been a thing. I haven’t always been able to do it, I know looking back what I wrote before was rough and jagged, not flowing and often stalling or rushing on ahead. I know that while I have moved on (I have written nearly 50k words on my current work in progress), I still have a lot to learn.
I have a higher education certificate from Open university, which involved sociology and creative writing I believe. I did a few short writing courses and have even had some help from a real author (as opposed to my being more of a wannabe at present), who let me see her teaching material – cracking stuff I might add. But in order to get somewhere with my writing, in order to be a success with it, I need something more, I need experience, luck and determination. So I’m going to start by gaining experience, I write for iWrite.com, small blog posts etc, it’s essentially ghostwriting as the articles turn up on other sites/blogs but with someone else’s name. It’s not a great money maker, in fact, the amount some offer for what they are requesting is not worth looking at, but you have to start somewhere and the site works well.
The next step is, in my mind at least, submissions. I have only done it once and that was a long time ago. I need to do it again and I need to do it frequently. So I’ve googled for magazines and sites that take submissions and sifted the page upon page of websites offering advice on where to submit your work.
My resolution isn’t that I will be published by all of them before the year is out, or even that I will be published by 1 of them, but simply to submit something to more than half before the year is out. Realistically I have to acknowledge that good writing is rarely quick, that I work full time and that I still have my WIP and my blog to work on as well as iWriter.com. So I think getting the ball rolling is probably a priority here.
Here is what I have picked out from amongst the rabble (there are 12 here, there’s a lot to choose from), when I submit to the one I’ll post it on Instagram, if I get a response I’ll let you know that too. And if I get accepted, I’ll let everyone know:
Learn & Love You 