Become a successful author

I love writing! I am a pretty good speller…
But anyways, Ive started SO MANY stories its not even funny. I just can never finish them! There’s this one story that I started, Its called Killing the Jonsons. It was turning out REALLY good! But then I just, stopped.
Maybe I’ll post some of the story later, but Im not at my mom’s house so I dont have the journal it was in :P

After not submitting any work for the last three months, I’m diving head first into the world of chapbook competitions. I spent most of that hiatus working on new poems, and I’ve finally accumulated enough good ones to compile a chapbook. I’m submitting it to five different contests, and the first manuscript went in the mail on Monday. I know I won’t win, but I figured if I could get the required number of poems together there was no reason not to submit. At this point, my submission process isn’t really about getting published, it’s about getting comfortable with the submission process. Once I’m comfortable with it, then I won’t feel as hesitant about sending stuff out.

In order to become a successful author you need to submit your work for publication. This is something I’ve worked very hard at putting off for a number of years. But I can’t do it anymore. If I want people to read my stuff I’ve got to put it out there. That’s all there is to it.

So, inspired by Ariel Gore’s book “How to Become a Famous Author Before You’re Dead” I wrote my first brand spanking new essay is ages and sent it out for publication last week. Of course, it was rejected, but that’s fine. The fire under my ass has already been lit and I’m going to keep sending work out until someone says “Yes, we want to publish that piece you sent us.” I’ve got a couple of poems I plan to submit to an anthology about grief, and I’m reviewing online and print literary magazines to see which ones fit my aesthetic.

I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was in grade school. I took an interest in writing as a career when my step-grandmother purchased a Brother typewriter. I bet I pounded out-single-fingered, no doubt-about 20 pages of my very first short story on that new piece of technological equipment; it beat writing out my ideas with a #2 pencil in long hand, by a long shot. That typewriter put an end to sore fingers, aching wrists, and oh, how easy it was to DELETE, rather than erase and rewrite.

I don’t remember what the first story I wrote on that typewriter was about, but my grandfather liked it so well that he saved it in a shoe box. Every story, poem, or story idea that I typed on that typewriter, my grandfather collected and saved over the years. He even saved things I threw away—stories I assumed were a dead end and no good. If I ever get hungry for a good story idea in the future, or if I can’t think of something impacting to write, I bet I could go to that shoe box and come up with something unique from the years and years of paperwork that my grandfather saved up as I perfected my writing from a child to a teenager, and from a teenager to a young adult.

The genre I want to write for isn’t very specific. Sometimes I get a good horror/thriller story idea, sometimes a mystery or whodunnit, and other times I may get an idea for a good tear-jerker or inspirational story. My ideas aren’t related to just one type of reader entertainment, so I don’t get fixated on studying just one market genre of writing class. I know there is one genre I will never write for: romance.

I believe that romance novels-better known as non-illustrated porn-is a massacre of trees, as I believe that much better stories and topics of interest can exist on paper rather than something like, “He took her into his clutches, wrapping his long bronze arms around her bodice, and pulled her into him for a long, soft, deep kiss. As she moaned from the warm softness of his lips on hers, he thrusted his…” ...Well, you get the idea. That genre is just not me! I cannot see myself writing that unless I were very high on Lithium and alcohol, and probably starving for sexual attention. Although I may not particularly like romance novels or believe that they bear any significance on society as a whole, I do admire Nicholas Sparks and his ability to capture “true love” at its best.