Welcome 2024. I hope you bring many new beginnings and many more sustained connections.
As a writer, sometimes I get bogged down under the weight of trying to achieve perfect prose. I want everyone to love everything I write. And if I don’t think it’s good enough, I can’t publish it or even finish the project. The anxiety of perfection is debilitating. This anxiety has kept my creativity in severe lockdown this past year.
When I was a teenager, I published my first website on Angelfire. I don’t even know if the platform exists anymore, but my page was several poems I had written that had won writing contests at school. The internet held this amazing promise of allowing creative people to share their art with the world.
Since then, though, the internet has become a mixed blessing. Filled with art but filled with mindless dribble as well. Politicians, corporations, and the 1% have made the majority of the internet an unpleasant and soul-crushing place to be yet we are so addicted to it that we cannot put it away. We know internet exposure, particularly from specific social media sites and types of content, has extremely harmful effects on the mental health of users, yet we keep logging on because we are convinced we need it.
Even my MFA program has spent several classes telling me I **NEED** to be active DAILY on all of the social media, that publishers won’t touch me unless I have a massive devoted audience and subscriber list to an e-mail that I send out WEEKLY, even DAILY.
The idea of complying with that requirement makes me break into anxious hives. I don’t want to get e-mails daily or even weekly from other authors, even my favorites. If you have that much to say to your audience as an author, when are you actually writing? When are you putting in the creative work? Many of the authors that actually comply with this industry rule have their art suffer greatly from such distractions.
I followed a **Bestselling** author recently for almost two years. She posted two to five social media posts a day, a blog entry, and an e-mail nearly every day. I envied her success. She pumped out a new book every two to three months, and all of them were highly successful. Then, I actually sat down and read one of her books.
UGH.
It was horrible. It desperately needed a plot and an editor. But people were purchasing the book in the thousands. Why?
I think it is because she has built this massive following and her followers aren’t actually reading the books. Or, they are reading them but have accepted the sub-par quality because of her popularity.
The point I am trying to get around to here is that I don’t want that. I’d rather have twenty loyal readers who appreciate the quality of my writing, the intensity of the plot and characters, and the experience of the story than a hundred thousand copies sold and none of them read.
I want to continue to be a published author. I love writing, creating, and sharing my characters and their struggles with others. But not at the cost of my happiness, sanity, and emotional well-being.
In the upcoming year, I want to change the way I do things. I’ve created a short list of what I expect to accomplish in the upcoming year.
- Complete the Masters in Fine Arts Creative Writing program through SNHU.
- Participate in and enter 6 short fiction contests. (I love writing short fiction based on a prompt and do not get enough opportunities to do so. Entering writing contests further allows me to test my skills against other writers, allowing me to grow and improve.)
- Continue to learn painting skills. My goal for this year is to eventually create a canvas composition from scratch. (The end goal for this skill is to eventually complete my father’s model car collection. This will be several years away, though, since my skills are coming along slowly.)
- Continue pursuing digital photography skill improvement.
- Read 100 books, focusing on a mix of classics, new releases, banned books, and industry trade books.
- Journal my experiences through this blog. I will be sharing many of my physical skill improvements, but also my emotional journey as I continue to grieve the loss of my father, my mental health struggles, and parenting neurodivergent children.
- Finish my thesis novel and prepare it for publication. I want to try traditional publishing routes, and I will be sharing my query, pitch, and synopsis exploration with my readers.
I hope to add more subscribers and readers this year, but it’s okay if I don’t. I appreciate every single person who takes the time to read my blog or my work.
I appreciate you so much!
I hope you’ll continue to share this space with me in the coming year.
Until next time,
Cathy Marie Bown
Cathy Marie Bown 