A local small business owner once told me that having a small business involves a lot of pivoting. I think living a creative life—or even just having a creative practice—is much the same.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve identified as a fiction writer. Short stories when I was little progressed to longer short stories in my high school creative writing class, until my last college professor told me, “I strongly believe that you are a novelist. It’s obvious that you enjoy spending longer stretches of time with your characters, and that you want to follow them through days and months and years rather than the briefer exposure that the short story form privileges.”
I found that so f*cking validating.
Until I spent the last eight years mired in the same manuscript, too bogged down in it that I can no longer see the forest for the trees. Until I realized that as much as I enjoy dabbling in blogging, it doesn’t really serve my dream: writing and publishing fiction that people enjoy reading. Until I realized how disconnected I feel now from the reason I began writing all those years ago: because I loved it.
I’ll continue to blog occasionally on Substack, but I don’t think that’s the best place to share fiction writing, which is why I’ve returned to Wattpad. I thought maybe serializing my current WIP to share with more readers as I go would hold me accountable to finally finishing it, and I always enjoyed having readers comment on the fanfiction I published in college and how that helped me keep up momentum.
I’m not going to promise anything right now because I don’t want to risk being unable to deliver. But…I’m glad to be back here, and excited to write.
