Support

It seems impossible that it’s been nearly an entire month since the last post and since the Snake River Writers Conference. I have been focused on making revisions to Silent Thunder and have been consumed with an idea for a new novel that I’m going to try and write in November as it is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words in a single month, which is a huge goal and one easily dropped if you were out there by yourself. But writers are not by themselves because writers – regardless of genre or audiance – support writers. There are support groups like #Snake River Writers and #StoryNinja as well as #NaNoWriMo groups. I know of three NaNoWriMo groups in a 50 mile stretch on the I-15 corridor. The writing community is one of the most supportive business associations I have found. It’s probably because writers don’t think of themselves as a business, with a product and a bottom line. We’re all about all the lines, not just the bottom one … couldn’t resist the pun.

But writing is a business and we are all competing for readers/customers and our place in the market. It blows me away every time I walk into a bookstore and see shelf after shelf stuffed with books and tables piled high with the latest releases and feature novels. It hit me again as I sat in the conference with 100 other writers and wanna-be-writers and listened as agents told us they choose not more than 50 new agents a year. Even if you bust the odds and make it through to secure an agent, and the agent can sell your book to a publisher, and you edit it for the market, and it gets a cover and a title and fancy dust jacket, it still sits on shelf waiting for a reader to see it among the jillion of other books written by authors just like you.

Those same authors who say, “Don’t give up,” “Write with me and we’ll get through this block,” “Join us for NaNoWriMo,” “You write, therefore you are a writer,” “I have this great tool for developing characters or plotting a story and I’ll share it for free.”

These people (I have to phrase it like this because I don’t know them personally) are amazing and I’m so happy and grateful to have found such great writers and writing support.