Insecure Writers Support Group founded by the one and only, Alex J. Cavanaugh. If you're a writer, insecure, or just supportive of writers—insecure or not—please join us. It happens the first Wednesday of each month. It would be sweet of you to visit at least a dozen or so new blogs and leave a comment. Your words will be appreciated. Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.
My awesome co-hosts for the November 4 posting of the IWSG are Jemi Fraser, Kim Lajevardi, L.G Keltner, Tyrean Martinson, and Rachna Chhabria!
November 4 question - Albert Camus once said, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Flannery O’Conner said, “I write to discover what I know.” Authors across time and distance have had many reasons to write. Why do you write what you write?
To me...
Writing is like breathing...
I have no choice...
Ideas come to me from out of nowhere...
And I don’t even get to choose the format or genre.
When I was young it was poetry...
Next came short stories...
And then my first novel came to me...
In the shower no less...
Random bits and pieces flowed to me...
And I had no idea where they were coming from...
But I felt compelled to write them down...
So, wrapped in a towel, I ran run to my computer...
And wrote everything that was coming into my head...
It felt like I was taking dictation.
After a year of this...
I looked at what I’d written and thought...
I have a book here...
And I did.
But after clumsy submissions and scads of rejections...
My insecurities took over...
And I closed the file and didn't open it for over a decade.
Then...
With the encouragement from writer friends...
I opened the file again...
And after editing until my eyeballs fell out...
I sent out more queries...
Then more rejections...
But I wasn't going to give up...
I decided to Self-publish. And here is the fruit of my labor.
And still...
Every morning while I'm writing on my computer...
I thank my muse...
Because if it was up to me and my brain...
I couldn’t write a word.
And yup...
I still get inspiration in the shower.
So?
What about you?
Why do you write what you write?
Always,
Em-Musing
P.S. AZAEL'S LOT is available on Amazon under my pen name:
Karen Lee Baldwin. And surprisingly the genre is supernatural thriller...
not humorous women's fiction.
