Re-Vision

I'm Susan, and I've been writing for 45 years. I'm not terribly old, but for lack of another talent, I did start pretty early. I have always romanticized writing, comparing everything I wrote to Hemingway while longing for a seat at Dorothy's Algonquin Round Table and fearing that F. Scott had simply "used all the words". I was raised to love books and to revere their authors, maybe a little too much. "They" were the authors and I was me. The odds were long and the work longer. But still I managed to crank out poems, songs, stories, and essays at a feverish clip throughout my childhood and into adulthood.

Then my fear was that I could never compose a "book-length" work. That one dogged me for years until, at 34, I finally finished my first novel. Then in a five year span I cranked out two more novels and two kids--pretty good production, especially for a highly trained self-doubter. Now to get the three non-breathing offspring published.

Fast-forward ten years and here I am, having played by the "rules" and submitted, oh yes, submitted, for well over a decade. If in those earlier years I questioned my ability to be a "real" writer, what now am I to do with the prospect of being a "real" indie publisher? Oddly enough, when Keri proposed the idea, I was ecstatic...ready. I suppose I had finally come to the age and the point where the fear was gone and the fallacies exorcized. And if I could take control of what has always been mine anyway, then why not get the beauty and the angst out there and let the words fall where they may.

Keri likes the old notion I walked around with for years that if I couldn't manage to be delivered to the reader by the big houses, and in hardcover of course, that I would just type out my stuff and hide it amongst the "real" books on the library shelves. I might have done it, too. Or you know what, maybe that's exactly what I'm finally getting the nerve to do.