When I was a teenager I was pretty sure that I would be a writer when I was an adult. I am, it seems but I haven’t really published much, so sometimes I wonder if it counts. It does, I know, it is my choice if I want to know how to publish a book or not. Sometimes I don’t really want to, which is probably the main reason that I have not.
Why don’t I want to? I ask myself this question. The basic answer is that I am not the most organized person in the world. So I have written many pages of poems and lyrics and short stories and I have sat down several times with the idea of publishing in mind. Those times I made what I called a publishing file and I sorted through my writing with publishing in mind. When it comes down to it, though I guess to publish a book is not really my priority though I know it would make me more respectable in the eyes of people who know I am a writer but wonder why I have not published much of anything.
I used to think that I would publish a book of fiction such as a novel but when I sat down to try and do it, I wasn’t able to get the writing to flow. Short pieces such as short, true stories flow out of me much more easily. So the closest I have come to writing a book is to write five hundred pages of short true stories. I have published some of these in a sense because they were used at my college for a student publication and for a student concert. I read a bunch of them outloud to some music a friend composed. They played a few of the stories read to music in between each song they were playing as part of the student concert. I couldn’t be there as I lived in a different town at that point but I had a song included too. I felt good about it because only about a third of the people in the program had anything in the concert and I was one of that third plus they used my writing for the intermissions. That was kind of a long time ago, but still it is my choice if I am going to publish anything, or if I’m happy to just store up writing.
