Discouraged

The Cuirt festival is on this week in Galway, and I'm thrilled that this year I'll be here and able to attend at least a few events. 

I started off this morning with a workshop, which was a lot of fun but left me wondering: Am I getting old?  I am terribly ageist when it comes to writing workshops.  I can take each writer as an individual, but generally there are two groups in any class; those who aspire to careers as professional writers, and those who write primarily for their own amusement.  The career-oriented writers are generally younger, in their 20s and 30s, while most of the hobbyists have long since gone grey and retired from their day jobs.  I know that some of the older people will go on to write actual books while the younger ones lose heart in their creative endeavors, but I still felt more than a little discouraged when I looked around the table today.  

The trouble was that the instructor, Nuala Ni Chonchuir (and yes, I'm too lazy to figure out how to put the accents in), is my age and well-established as a writer. Her works are in print while mine are almost all unpublished. I don't know when she started writing seriously, but her first book was published in 2003, only a year after I decided to devote myself semi-full-time to building my career as a novelist.  At that point, I wasn't very far behind in my so-called writing career, but somehow this morning made me feel like I'd missed the boat.

I don't know why I had to start off writing a big, fat fantasy novel, but that happens to be where I began.  Even if I'd written short stories, I would have had to deal with the American market which is harder to break into than Ireland's relatively small publishing scene.  I know that I could have used my time more effectively, made better decisions about what to work on, pursued leads that I left unexplored, and so on, but I didn't. 

Today, I worry that if I let it all go much longer, I'll start claiming that I only write for myself, and that I don't care about publication or what other people think. I worry that I'll stop caring so much, stop re-writing, stop striving to make my work all that it can be. I know, logically, that I still have time, but I can also see that time getting shorter -- quickly.

I'd better stop blogging for the day and take a look at some real work!

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