Boy howdy, did it not suck.
In fact, looking back, I’d have to say that 2011, as far as years go, was my best in a while. A long while.
This was the year when I felt for the first time validated.
External validation, however much I’m not supposed to need it, came with my first publication in a small press and my acceptance into Viable Paradise — two things I thought were years away, if possible at all. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express how much they meant to me. It still feels like my shell has been cracked open. Besides the take-away of meeting an incredible bunch of talented and funny and dear people on top of the accumulated knowledge of decades of publishing and writing acumen by professionals whose work I enjoy and whose opinions I trust and value, I left Viable Paradise knowing, at long last, that I’m not crazy. That what I want to do is valuable, and that it’s within my grasp so long as I continue to reach for it.
(Not that my Writing Group hasn’t been awesome in that regard. Sylvie, Aura, Julia, Andy and Randy have been so very important to me these last years. But we are friends, too, and there is always the worry that kindness born of friendship can hold back the critical tongue.)
This was also the first year where I validated myself. I turned my wishes into promises, and kept them. I submitted stories. I applied to Viable Paradise and when I was accepted I didn’t talk myself out of it because of fear of not being any good, of not belonging, of not having the money, of being scared shiftless of flying — any of it.
Fuck fear.
I also completed (even if it was cutting it damn close) the first pass of the novel revision. Not done, as I constantly remind myself, but a milestone, one that had I missed would have spiraled me backwards into that nebulous never-where of writing/not-writing. It was the first external goal that I didn’t talk myself out of or let slip by through inaction.
And like the first completed draft, the first completed revision, the first anything, once I’ve done it, the mental stumbling block is lifted away and there will be no going back. I could go on about wishing I hadn’t wasted the last 20 years of my life not doing what it is my heart has been singing since I was born, but fuck it. No more whining about what’s gone. All it does is eats up today, and all my tomorrows.
I write. This is what I do. Nothing else matters worth a damn.
So here’s to 2012. I expect good things of it, and myself.
And I’ll share it all here.
Resonance: “that nebulous never-where of writing/not-writing”
A great, succinct description of the writer’s condition.