Two Unpublished Manuscripts Sit In My Computer

Two incomplete manuscripts sit in my PC.

 

I started one last year and the other this year.

 

They’re called Pushing Past Fear and Heartsongs from a Lifetime of Journal-Keeping.

 

I just re-read them. They’re good.

 

But the journal one is so daunting that I put it away for a while. It requires me going into my 150+ journals and gleaning the best stuff from them. It’s going to take more time than I may have left on earth to finish it!  So, I may end up just leaving the task to someone else, if anyone wants to do it after I’m dead!

 

The other is a self-help book that coaches people to ignore their amygdala-clanging red alerts and life live the way they would if fear weren’t constantly tripping them up.

 

I’m aware of how much fear I had to decide to ignore to get where I wanted to go, from the fear of not measuring up to the fear of  looking or sounding ridiculous when I proclaimed I wanted to be a writer when I grew up (not to mention wanting to be a man when I grew up)…

 

I imagined responses like, “Preposterous!” “What do you know enough about that’s worth reading?! You’re still a wet-behind-the-ears kid!!!”

 

Back then, I didn’t know if anything I knew was worthy of being preserved on paper: all I knew was that I needed to write!

 

And except for my teachers–God bless them!!!–no other adults in my life (until DeForest Kelley and Ted Crail came along in the late 60’s and early 80’s)  were even remotely enthusiastic about my goal. The other adults were all Realists, well aware (way back then) that darned few writers were making enough money writing to support themselves. And the few who were were all men. (Little did I know that their editors and researchers were usually unacknowledged/un-credited women!)

 

Writing for a living seemed too much like a pipe dream. There was no Internet, no Information Age, no 24/7/365 cable channels back then, all of which require writers.

 

The 50’s and 60’s were a stark, dangerous wilderness for writers… I was scared! So, I took other jobs that paid the bills… for decades…. while continuing to write fiction and in my journals.

 

Oh, I wrote at work, for work-related reasons, whenever I had the opportunity, but the opportunities were few and far between.

 

These days, it’s a whole new world. A good writer can make a living writing. You have to be cagey, and disciplined, and willing to say no when clients want something for less than it’s worth, but there are still enough clients out there who recognize the enormous ROI that comes with hiring a good writer; you just have to have the persistence to find them and make yourself known.

 

I don’t know what my next book will be. It might be one of these two unpublished manuscripts, or something entirely different. My Muse will let me know. I’m not in charge of that.

 

At some point, I’ll simply get wildly enthused about finishing one or both of them or something else, and then wild horses won’t be able to keep me away from tackling the task. I’ll start to feel “pregnant with possibility” and a few days or a week after that, IT will arrive: the impetus I need to sit down and start typing under my own name.

 

It always happens this way.