ROBUST discussion

I found my way over here from Indiespot's forum. Thus far I've been pretty impressed with all these new discovers of writing associations and groups. I recall a decade ago, that at best I came across a writer's critique group on a Yahoo group.

I've been writing as long as I can recall. It would come in periodic spurts every few years. In my early twenties I even took to the task of attempting to be a fulltime freelance writer. I squeezed out a magazine article, ghostwrote a couple projects, and had a short story fiction series published. I decided that working for 25 cents an hour wasn't that impressive, so I went back into the work force.

A few times in my life I thought I was ready to knock out my first novel. Looking back, I failed because I planned too much, if that makes any sense. I even once managed to get to 50 pages of a novel before I scrapped it.

Now at the age of 32, I'm married with two twin daughters and have an extremely demanding career as a financial planner. And for whatever reason, the itch to write has sprung up again. And this time I prepared for it, by not preparing at all.

I just wrote. And kept writing. I cared little about grammar, or structure, or much of anything else. My goal is to simply just get the rough draft out of the way. So now I'm 5000+ words into my novel that took me at this point three days to write. I'm doing my best to at least knock out 1000 words per day until the entire story is out of me.

Then I'll go back over that dog pile of crap and mold it into perfection. I'm going straight to self-publishing because I believe I stand a much better chance for success there, then the tradional method of getting published.

Thanks for taking the time to hear a little bit about my story.

Welcome, Shawn.

Colleen McCullough said that when she started out she was a nurse. Over a holiday, she wrote 10k or 20k words each day for a fortnight, and she had a bestseller, The Thornbirds.

Good luck with doing as well as Colleen!

Shawn, you've found the secret of being an author -- one that many writers try to avoid: the actual act of writing. It's roughly 1,000,000,000 times easier to think up other things to do than it is to just sit down and start typing. Good luck with your book.