I apologize for the lengthy hiatus I have taken from blogging. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. A while back, I announced that I would be running a writer’s meeting. If you follow me on twitter, then you probably got my second announcement that my meeting was canceled and my presentation along with it. When I heard this, I felt an odd sense of disappointment. I’m not the most “look-at-me” kind of guys and I was worried about whether my talk was adequate, but I was still disappointed. I think it might have been because of the care I put into the talk, whether it would have been adequate or not. It was my special work and now I would not beable to share it.
This whole thing has also made me think about the novel I have been working on. My feelings of inadequacy about my talk are nothing to my fears about my own writing. I have always expected not to succeed on my first try (though I’ve often fantasized otherwise), but that doesn’t make it any easier. Thoughts of “why am I bothering” sometimes trickle through my mind, which I must try to ignore. When I actually do finish and hit walls in publishing my work, I am unsure of how I’ll react. Will I keep striving forward, as all authors must? Or will I cave and slink off, letting my work gather dust (if things did gather dust in Word).
But that’s the life of an aspiring writer, I suppose. You have to ignore the self-doubt and how daunting the path ahead is. You need to keep working at it, because writing is a skill like any other; you actually need to develop your writing to make your work good and the only way to develop is to stubbornly persist at it. No one will succeed every time. We will all have things that don’t pan out how we envisioned. We all need to prepare for these moments, but that does not mean we have to give up. The notification that my talk was canceled suggested I could give it whenever we next needed a volunteer to run the meeting. I’m not sure when that will be, but I will keep an eye out for an opportunity, because that is what we all must do. Keep seizing chances to get experience and develop oneself.
