TheBanyanTree: Knowing When To Stop

[Monique Colver]

How does one know when it's time to stop? For as long as I can remember,
I've wanted to write. I have written, in a rather desultory fashion at
times, but I've written. Sometimes well, sometimes not, better than some,
worse than others. My talent lies in the middle somewhere, verging on
mediocre on bad days, better on other days. 
	I wanted to be different. I needed to be different, growing up, just
to be noticed. Any attention, even negative, is better than none, and I
excelled at being the odd one. I thought this meant I was different, but
maybe it just meant I was . . . not so different. 
	Early works of mine included newspapers, where I made up the content
and laid it all out in my careful writing, then handed it over to a parental
unit, who would, if anything, chortle over my mistakes in getting the names
right. I was a little kid, what did I know? 
	I never excelled at anything. Never won prizes, never stood out in
any way. But always I knew that I was meant to be a writer, and that
eventually I would do that, and that is what I would have for my very own. I
wanted something of my own. 
	In my thirties I was actually paid for writing. What a wonderful
time that was! It was mostly business writing, which I found boring, but
paid for writing? What a bargain! I also wrote a column for the AF Times for
awhile, inside back cover below the fold, unless I wrote something really
important, and then they'd move me above the fold. I was once bumped for a
US Congresswoman who wanted to say something that particular week, so my
column, which was basically, some weeks, an exercise for an unknown (me) to
be excoriated for my inflammatory comments and twisted view of military
life, was pulled. But mostly I was there every other week, below the fold,
with a picture, writing on whatever topic I had picked for that issue. And
they sent me checks.
	And I thought that was how writing was. You wrote something people
liked and they paid for it. Easy, said I, I could do this!
	Then I got sidetracked. Things happened. Life took turns. I did some
more writing, but eventually it faded away as I concentrated on supporting
myself. Once I moved and left my contacts, some of which consisted of a
business journal that I'd been writing for but that had fallen on hard times
and eventually went out of business, it became harder to get back into it,
and other things cropped up. Like trying to stay housed and fed. That can be
a big deal, even for us starving artists. You'd be surprised how much some
of us like to eat indoors.
	And now, with half a book waiting to be finished and numerous ideas
waiting to be fleshed out and plans being made to cut down on my other
career to focus just a bit more on writing, I'm thinking: what if this is a
bad idea? I haven't published in years, what if I never publish again? What
if I am just a washed up has-been who, while still amusing, doesn't have it
in her to be the writer I always thought I was? What if those books in my
head never do get out on paper the way I envision them? And believe me, I
envision them. I know the stories, I know what I want to say, and I have
pieces of many of them floating around, mostly on my computer these days.
Since I learned the ways of the computer I have become quite adept at
leaving pieces of myself inside of it, words that are part of something, or
words that stand on their own, words that I know go somewhere, even if, when
I write them down, I'm not exactly sure where. It'll come to me later, or it
won't. Either way, lots of words, some of which will coalesce into
something.
	I've always wanted to write short pieces, essays, and long pieces,
books. I am an equal opportunity writer. My family thinks it's a weird
little hobby. I'm not actually a WRITER, I'm just someone with delusions of
grandeur. I'm sure there are others who think so also. And for a while
today, I thought so too. I thought that it was time to move on from writing,
time to find something productive that I could do well and give up this
crazy lifelong dream of actually, someday, being just a writer. It's too
hard, I thought, to build an entire career around a talent as tenuous as
mine, to make the contacts and make the relationships necessary to be
published.
	So it's not easy. Everyone's a writer, and at this stage I'm just
one of a billion. I may always be just one of a billion. That's not an easy
thing for me, because I've always been one of a billion and I'd like to be
special, just once or twice, which may be why I started with the writing so
long ago - it was the only thing I had a bit of talent in. (Yes. I know. I'm
special in my own way. We all are. Tell that to my ego.) So it won't be
easy. Who said life was going to be easy anyway? A friend of mine just told
me the answer to that: "People without dreams."
	How sad for them.  
	The same friend also told me I need just a bit more self-confidence
and I need to start following the one rule that really matters if one wants
to do this for a living: Submit. Submit again. Then submit again. Submit.
Submit. Submit. 
	Guess I'm not ready to give up on it yet. I'll give it a bit more
time.

DISCLAIMER: This post was written without use of a D key. Yes, there are D's
and d's sprinkled throughout the text, but not there's no key there, just a
small little nubbin that I have to make sure I press. It slows down my
typing speed something horrible, but I'm sure that in the future we will
develop the technology to fix these sorts of things.