This fearless author finished NaNoWriMo, moved, and became a lump of achy muscles.

Service may be interrupted while system rebooting occurs.

Then on to project working, motivation and ambition, all that whatnot.

(Original About page, the beginning of my work on this website and on taking my writing seriously as a career. Enjoy the rambling pledge I made to myself!)

I am considering this moment a beginning for my writing career. (And I say career with grand optimism.) Perhaps it is only the beginning of this part of what could become my career. It is likely arbitrary. Mainly it is sitting myself down and telling myself that I will take my writing seriously, that I will pursue it, that I will make it a priority in my time. I’ve taken that pledge before, and I’ll take it again whenever necessary.

This moment for me seems like an opportune time for me to solidify that pledge to myself.

I recently graduated from college. Like many people at this stage, I have been in school of various forms for a very long time. And while I was in high school, while I was in community college, while I went through undergraduate studies, I set aside my own writing. I wrote for my classes, I wrote research papers, seminar discussions, study reflections, and very occasionally I would write a journal entry or a short story or a piece of opinion that was my own. My writing oasis during school became NaNoWriMo, the one crazy chaotic month out of the school year that prioritizing my own writing over schoolwork was totally acceptable and expected. It was the reminder of how much I actually did love writing.

Over the last few months since graduation, I’ve been working to get back into the practice of writing something, something of mine, every day. To bring the prioritization and love of writing from November into the everyday. At some point in the process I attended my second writing conference.

The first time I had attended I considered it practice, first experiences, and getting an idea of what I should expect and plan for. This most recent time was still new experiences, I still was unprepared, I still didn’t have writing that was ready, and I still wasn’t ready to attempt any professional networking. Then when I came back from this conference, I was energized to work on my writing, to work on taking my writing seriously, to work on taking myself seriously, and prepare.

That’s still a process I’m working on. I don’t feel professional, I don’t always manage to sit down and write. I get distracted easily. But, I’ve decided these goals are significant and justified, and that I want to pursue them. I want to pursue them now.

This is my starting point.

I hope you’ll join me.

I created my first writing blog somewhere around the age fourteen, and I used shades of black and shimmering neon blue, and a photo where I dramatically looked into the distance that had been digitally altered to look like a hundred year old newspaper. I kept that blog periodically updated for years, and ended up posting about fifty pieces of my writing, all varying in quality. It was called Lurking Girl and it highlighted the pieces of my personality that watched, listened, and didn’t make me feel particularly visible. Part of it was processing my observations, part of it was having a place to share my writing.

I have a lot of love for that blog and obviously some of the themes have carried over onto this website. It was incredibly daunting to start out on this perfectly new platform, with a blank slate. I was leaving a piece of history and built up identity behind, even if it was a very small piece. When I started with this site, I didn’t update for months. One post and then nothing. Maybe another and nothing again. I didn’t have a solid idea of what I wanted it to be, and I felt weirdly guilty for leaving behind another place where I had put in a lot of effort and time. Finally, the decision to actually update this site came with the decision to take writing seriously. I wanted to build up something that has a lot of capacity to expand and is aimed toward setting up the beginnings of my writing career.

The word Badass has been resonating with me over the past months since I made that decision. For me it means a feeling of invincibility, strength, or confidence. There are long stretches when those feelings are few and far between, and I’ve not yet conquered many demons. But I want to work toward having that feeling around more often. I want to remind myself it’s not gone forever, and that it can be cultivated and encouraged.

This day is the second anniversary of this website’s existence, and it’s grown a lot since I started it. I want it keep growing, to refine and improve.

I want this site to be a big part of cultivating the badass in myself, and in anyone else who wants to come along for the adventure.

The window of my hotel room looks out over a small interior courtyard and a little fountain. It’s very pretty and peaceful. I have my name tag that says I’ll be here until Sunday, that tells me I have an Advanced Manuscript Critique set up. I’ve attended the pre-conference workshop on “conference success basics”, and the Pitch for the Prize event.

I’m at my first writer’s conference, Willamette Writers Conference in Portland Oregon. I registered at the end of May and drove three hours to get here. I fixed up the first fifteen pages or so of my most recently finished novel for the critique.

I’ve spent the last three years writing primarily for my classes, for my school. Not for myself. In the last three years, November with its frenzy of an event called NaNoWriMo has been my only refuge for my own writing as I’ve been evermore distracted with Running Start and Evergreen. And while I love going to college, and while I love what I’m learning about, I’ve been getting further and further away from my identity as a writer.

The novel I finished when I was twelve seems so faraway it’s unreal. The multitudes of others that I’ve started have been left collecting dust in the corners of my computer for years. The short essays I’ve published in an educator’s magazine’s teen writing series don’t reflect my current style, nor the content I want to write about. The local high school writing contest I took 1^st Place in is an amazing and surreal memory.

The blog I kept vaguely occasionally sometimes updated was privatized back in January when I switched to a new platform. A new platform that, since January, has acquired all of three tiny stories and an “about” page that’s far more ambitious than I currently feel.

I feel out of touch with my writing, and with the writing I want to grow into writing. I feel out of touch with the ten year old me who could read six books in a week and practically devoured the local library. I went to the library a few days ago and I couldn’t remember how to pick up my holds.

It’s ridiculously daunting to listen to the people here talk about pitching books and ideas. There’s a small part of me that worries I’ve become an interloper in an area that was quite recently the place where I felt most at home, writing.

This last year of my education it seems I’ve mainly succeeded in racking up an extensive list of things I need to learn or relearn before I can properly adult. And there are so many more things that have come up in the last five hours here.

I don’t have a platform. I don’t promote my blog or update it regularly. I have focused on doing well in school, often to the point of neglecting other important parts of myself.

I don’t have credentials (It’s hard to at 19). I have an Associate’s in Arts and I’ve taken some really cool classes that have covered topics that I more and more want to write about. But I am no expert and I don’t know whether the writing I want to do will ever fit into the right places for it to be a career.

I have a body of work in that I have written a lot of stuff. But that stuff isn’t anywhere near being able to show it to anyone. Of course I’m afraid that it never will be; all writers are, aren’t they?

I go back to school in a bit more than a month. My last year of school, I’m on track to get my bachelor’s degree. A general bachelor’s degree in arts. And there is so much more I need to learn. So much specific knowledge I need. I’m ready to be done with school, except I haven’t learned enough yet and I don’t know if I have the discipline and ambition to keep learning at the right pace when I get out of school to cover what I need to be the writer that I want to be.

But maybe, even as I sit through these workshops and panels and feel a little bit like I might not belong, it’ll be the kick that I needed to take it seriously again. Maybe it’ll remind me about the parts that I love about writing and that I can still get better at it. That it’s worth putting in the work to get better.

There are undoubtedly a wealth of resources here. And there are some really cool workshops happening. And I’m very much looking forward to them.

And I’m sitting here writing this instead of sleeping because it’s going to be a priority, dammit. And that’s awesome.

So maybe I do belong here after all.