This week I have been mostly travelling. Old haunts have been visited, old friends reconnected with, a new (first, and possibly only) football shirt bought for the Small.
It must be an Easter thing; the scent of new growth all around, the snitch of pollen – or maybe it’s the sense of getting away, four people squeezed into one moderately-sized hotel room. But there is an invigoration about the place, possibly, or partly, encouraged by the meeting of writers.
Yes, whilst many of my peers are off to Eastercon – somewhere I’ve never been as it’s always struck me as too mega-big, or as much that I’m never quite clued-up enough to organize going – I have met with some members of my old writing group.
When I started this blog, many, many days since, I was member of Abingdon Writers’. I was with them for over six years, including an anxiety-causing spell as Chair (not because they weren’t – and still are – lovely, rather because I feel tremendous pressure when put in places of responsibility, riding out my days upon the crest of the catastrophe wave). The group did me a tremendous amount of good as a writer, and possibly as a human being. My raw, untutored edges were sharply rounded off and I still feel tremendous gratitude for all they did for me.
And I’m still linked to them, in this wondrous age of Zoom and other remote-meetings-based software. I’m in AB-FAG, an Abingdon-centric manuscript exchange group with a select handful of them, which includes a member in Canada.
So it was good to actually meet physically with a few of them for – for me, at least; your method may differ – there’s nothing like one-to-one genuine human interaction, often accompanied by the beverage(s) of choice.
Indeed, my only regret is that I time I had with my peers was so brief. I had two meetings, the first in a pub, and in this we barely got beyond the ‘oh, my many ailments’ phase of conversation before I had to jet off to meet other old friends.
The second, next morning and with added caffeine, was curtailed by the need to check out of the hotel. Life is never quite as smooth as it is in fiction.
So what’s the takeaway of all this? Well, I’ve spent so long rambling about the whys and wherefores that I’ve omitted to say anything of note about that which we spoke. Perhaps I’ll come back to this another day. But my meetings included a self-publishing diehard and a self-publishing skeptic – the key question being what a trad publisher can do for you that you’re not expected to do yourself. I personally stand as an agnostic. Having done both I still want to be trad published because I think it’s easier to make friends in the field if you have a social media guru help make connections. But maybe I’m just saying that because I’m not very good at pushing myself forwards, either with the aim of sales or of forging bonds.
I have come away from my tiny (two night) sojourn a little soul-cleansed, most boosted by the support and friendship of lovely people. And the take-home message for me is this: persist. Keep going. Endure. I am still getting better as a writer, still considering ideas and learning from my mistakes. The people who succeed generally (citation needed) don’t come in on a blaze of talent and explode into the writerly stratosphere but work hard, meet deadlines, don’t piss people off and be consistent.
I know of writers with ten-year gaps in their literary CVs because they couldn’t get any interest in their intervening works. And that’s okay. Whatever you’re doing, whatever field you’re in, persistence pays – eventually, and sometimes in unforeseen ways, but it does pay.
And writing is reward in itself. The sense of achievement is something to hold on to – for all that everyone, these days, thinks they can write a novel, it’s a marathon to actually get that first draft on paper, and then a series of rocky ascents to get that work edited, tidied and perfected. And that’s before we even address the issue of getting submissions out to those what gatekeep the industry.
I feel invigorated, and refreshed, and (almost) ready to return to my keyboard.
Two small issues remain. One is the question of ring-fencing enough time to write amidst the dust and diesel of passing time. The second is whether or not I keep swimming against the rising tides of indifference and throw myself upon the kindness of agents, whether I self-publish, or whether I mothball the Somnia series and… well, I can’t really do that. Can I?
Anyway. Persist. Nevertheless persist.
A Writer's Life 