My Very First IWSG Post EVER!

Welp. It's the first Wednesday of the month, the day the Insecure Writer's Support Group posts about fears and insecurities and maybe even offers words of encouragement and advice to other writers. It all started HERE by Alex J. Cavanaugh. Follow the links to learn more, to find the blogs of all the other participants, and maybe even join in the fun yourself!

I just happened to be making my way through the blogosphere today and realized it's the day the IWSG does their thing, and I thought, HEY! You want to be a serious writer? You want to get back into blogging on a daily/weekly basis? You need to TRY this thing! So, it's my FIRST ever IWSG post! And talk about being INSECURE!!  Even when I wasn't blogging regularly, I still hopped around once in a while and saw all the first Wednesday of the month posts going on for forever, and I think I'm even a part of the IWSG Facebook group, but POSTING today?!? I feel like I'm the shy, quiet, girl with zero friends trying to sit at the cool kids table in the high school cafeteria!! I feel like I'm crashing this HUGE party, completely uninvited! So, hopefully some of my old friends recognize me and offer me a chair or scoot over to let me sit by them?!? Maybe say, "Hi, Christy! What are you eating today and how has life been and I think I noticed you in the back of my sixth period Chemistry class!"

This month's focus question:

What was your very first piece of writing as an aspiring writer? Where is it now? Collecting dust or has it been published?

After reading a couple of other writers' blogs, I realized there were firsts before my first completed manuscript. Firsts from when I was a child. There was the dark thriller I started sitting on the concrete floor of my parents' unfinished basement. I wrote about a paragraph of that one. There was the story about the girl in the haunted boarding school that I wrote after my dad brought home our very first computer. I have no recollection of how far I got in that one. There was the mystery series I penned while sitting in sixth grade study hall. I think maybe I outlined the first three books and got a few chapters into the first one.

But what I really consider my first is the manuscript I wrote in 2010. SOLSTICE. It's the manuscript that brought me to writeoncon.com where I met Erica and Michael and a handful of other writers who I came to know through blogging and critiquing future works, well, mostly SOLSTICE cuz at the time I thought, Hey! I wrote a novel. What do you mean it won't get published?!?! And then I posted it at querytracker and entered it in contests and rewrote the beginning a BAZILLION times and it got red-lined and chopped to bits by online readers. I queried it with a two-page long query that I squished into one by shrinking the font. I printed that over-written, purple-prosey manuscript out and put it in a binder and teacher friends read it and then finally, I read SHIVER and felt inspired to write something else. So, thankfully, I moved on. And then moved on from that manuscript, and another one after that....and six manuscripts later, here I am! SOLSTICE is still in that binder collecting dust under my nightstand or bed. It was about a girl, Dawn, who discovered she could see the auras of others. And then there was something about an alternate dimension. And there was her love interest, Lawrence. And other than Phin, the guy from the alternate dimension, I can't remember what the conflict in the story was. Probably why I could never nail down a query for that one!

And, that's that. Since I am feeling so very insecure today, I don't feel brave enough to offer advice of my own, but I do want to offer encouragement, so, friends, keep on keeping on! Write on! I'll be here until next month when it's time to try this thing again!

So, thanks for letting me plop myself down, brown bag lunch and all, right in the middle of all you COOL people out there.

This week I invited an author friend of mine to guest post about her writing journey (HERE), the hurdles she jumped to get to where she is today, and I feel that's quite fitting to link to for the spirit of the IWSG posts, so I'll leave you with her words of encouragement and advice:

So persevere and Write On! Outsiders might think we’re a wussy bunch but I know the reality—it takes a lot of guts to be an author.--Kathryn Berla, author of 12 HOURS IN PARADISE

christy