I feel so terrible that I missed her news when it first happened.

What news?  Check the second paragraph.

Who’s news?  Kiersten, of course.

Girl, my heartfelt congratulations!

(This is the second of my favorite aspiring authors/bloggers to hit it.  I’m starting to feel a little hope.)

You are a writer.  That’s great!  Does anybody else know?  Are you proud to be a writer?  Do you honor yourself as a writer?  What’s that?

If you do not honor yourself as a writer and respect your craft, no one else will, either.  Here are simple lists of things you can do to honor this part of you.

Take yourself seriously

• Call yourself a writer.
• Get what you need in terms of space and equipment (without letting it be an excuse to not write!).
• Make time to practice your craft.
• Set and strive to achieve your goals.  Celebrate them.

Respect your craft

• Educate yourself (through internet, books, and other no or low cost resources…no money required).
• Practice, practice, practice.
• Make time to improve your craft.
• Honor your commitments to yourself and as a writer.
• Give your words away as precious gifts to loved ones.

If you are interested in being published

• Learn the industry.
• Know your genre and your competition.
• Submit regularly, and take the feedback seriously.

To be a writer is a divine thing.  In order to be taken seriously you need to take yourself seriously.  In order to be good at what you do, you need to respect your craft.  If you have certain end results in mind, you’ll need to educate yourself and then pursue that goal with dogged determination.

It can be done…and it starts with respect and honor for yourself.

Let’s talk about the ugly side of writing success and the hope we all have for it.  There are emotions we don’t want to feel, know we should not give into, and to which  most of us fall prey regardless.  Do these sound familiar?  Competition, jealousy, envy, superiority, fear, insecurity, ego, bitterness, resignation…the list goes on.

Are we really in competition with each other as aspiring authors?  Is the only prize the book contract or the big advance or popularity?  If someone else succeeds does that mean we have failed?  Really?

Despite my firm belief that one success raises all of  us, I fall prey tho these emotions,  too.  I won’t call them petty.  They are not.  Even authors entrenched on the NYT Best Seller list can succumb.  It is part of being human and loving what we do. So how do you react when a writer friend you admire and like pulls ahead of you?  You react as a human being.  How do you respond?  That depends on your personal values.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Anthony’s post from last week.   He definitely had some good points, and some statements that probably upset our more squeamish writing brethren:

Fear and poor self-esteem belong together. They are inseparable and they feed off each other like a perverted Yin and Yang. The foundation of this fear is a poor image of self. This fear is prevalent in the online writing community; look no further than the responses to #queryfail.

I agree with his message.  I am also going to add something here.  Another writer’s success cannot be allowed to affect your sense of self as a writer or a person.  It cannot. Another writer’s success does not mean you have failed! You will feel envy.  You will feel jealous, resentful, or angry.  If you don’t, please open a vein and make sure you bleed like the rest of us.  Feel these things, put them in context, and move on.

What is frustrating about our industry is that a truly excellent writer with a winning personality and a great story can go unpublished until the day they die.  That’s truth. In order to handle this frustration, you need to aim at the narrow window of opportunity and keep focused on making your shot through it.  Don’t be distracted by the one next to you who got a lucky shot.  Be angry, feel jealous, give him the finger…and then be glad for him.  Of all the good writers out there, one of us got a shot.  One of us got the call.  Use it to sharpen your focus on that narrow window and keep trying.

I spent some time this weekend doing research.  I had meant to spend all of Saturday in research, but of course I got sidetracked into reading what I was researching.  Confused?  I’ll explain.

I was curious about writers who post novels and short stories to the internet.  These aren’t for critique.  The author, in most cases, feels they are complete.  A few others are publishing “blooks” (a blog that is a serial book).  I wanted to know if they had given up on being published or simply felt the need to share their words.  Did they know they were using the first rights?  Did they hope or expect to publish these posted works later?  Were they protecting those first rights behind passwords and  critique group formats?  I had a lot of questions.   I went to more than three dozen sites, but have listed just a few below:

J. A. Konrath has put his early novels and a short story collection up on his site for .pdf download.  His reasons are clear.  He’s off and running with the Jack Daniels series;  these earlier works were either unclassifiable or his agent didn’t want to represent them.  Konrath plainly states that he feels these samples will help people get to know how he writes and want to buy his published books.

Jennifer Armstrong has several of her works up for on line reading (no download), along with links to other free online novels.  Some of these are .pdf, some are formatted for readers, and some are strictly an online read.  There is no explanation on the site as to why her own works are given away, but the site appears to be updated regularly.

Michael Kimber (The Nightwriter) has three novels and more than a dozen short stories on his web site.  He came to writing late in life and says he doesn’t believe, as a result, that he will attain the skills of those who started younger.

Project Gutenberg has a host of works for download, many of them out of print and past copyright.  Formats range from audio to .pdf to plain text and include works by Jane Austen,  Mark Twain, and Charlotte Bronte.  The Art of War, The Iliad, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Grimms’ Fairy Tales are there.  Project Gutenberg is the original and oldest etext project on the internet, founded in 1971.

RKP Hunt posts completed works as well as WiPs, even encouraging forum readers to help with edits.  Most of the full works can only be read in the forums or at fictionpress.  Anyone can join the forum.

The Tell Tale Pen exists because the author felt the need to leave something behind.  There is a voluntary donation button, with the word being emphasized and the following quote:  “The light reading materials in this library were written as a labor of love and are provided to you freely for your reading  entertainment and enjoyment.”

SundogStories has such an excellent quote on their “Why” page that I will let them explain themselves:

“Bringing free literature, art, and music to the world, one electron at a time!”

By joining a small but growing number of writers, artists, and musicians who are posting their work on the Internet, we intend to honor and expand its original promise of being an open exchange for ideas and information. We are not Artists, just people who try to live creatively. We are not driven by the profit motive, but by a simple desire to share our work freely. We hope to encourage others to do likewise. This is the revolution. It is now. It is here. It is you. Will you join?

Incidentally, SunDog is where I got lost, reading St. Mary’s Avenue.

Oliver Benjamin doesn’t really provide an answer as to “why.”  I’ve read one of his novels (Abyssinia) , and will likely  read the other two.

The rest of the sites varied in format and professionalism.  There are some pretty good stories out there, though they are not perfect.  If it bothers you to see an occasional formatting error or missing word, I recommend you skip them.  If you are just after good stories, go for it.

I don’t have a lot of conclusions.  In some cases, i believe the author is unaware that he’s used First Rights.  In other cases, they aren’t after publishing contracts, so it doesn’t matter.  Several of these creative people find that writing comes, but isn’t the center of their lives.

Why does this matter?  The industry is what it is, and is changing to become what it will be, but it doesn’t seem to stop writers from sharing their words however they feel best to do so.  I found motivation of all sorts for these free works, and am intrigued by their thinking processes.

Why does it matter for me?  Some of us have a surfeit of words.  We write so much that there isn’t a home for all of it.  We can collect them into ebooks, file them in a drawer, or share them on the internet.   I can’t imagine sharing a complete novel unless I was convinced it would never be published AND that it had merit.  Short stories, story starts, and other creative tidbits, on the other hand, I am quite willing to share.  I still like the idea that we can have open exchange such as the internet has given us.  To somehow enrich those around you is to also enrich yourself.