Giving Thanks

As the year winds down, I like to take more than a couple of moments to consider what I’m thankful for. During our annual Thanksgiving feast, my family has a tradition of going around the table and saying what we’re grateful for. There’s the usual – family, friends, success, “glad it wasn’t worse” stuff. Mostly it’s personal, family matters. I seldom talk about what I’m grateful for as a writer, as an artist.

This year, I’m grateful for the opportunity to attend the Smarter Artists Summit in February. I’ll confess that I had really low expectations on that one. I probably wouldn’t have gone, but my audiobook producer paid the registration fee. I came away with a new outlining technique that I’ve used successfully a couple of times already. I’m not using it on the current book, so I’ll see how that works.

One thing Dean Wesley Smith said in a seminar was “As your career advances, what always worked will suddenly stop working. You’ll need to find another way.” I guess I’m at that point this year. It’ll be 12 years since I began writing seriously. So, I’m grateful for a group of crazy RMFW friends who’ve cheered, spurred, and generally jollied me along to be more productive. They’ve suggested stuff to me that made me examine my own practice. Sprints? Who knew? And a word tracking spreadsheet that turns sprints into a game? I love games.

This was the year I ran for office in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. (Second year, actually, but I wasn’t qualified to run last year – which I didn’t discover until I was well down the road.) It’s made me step out of my comfort zone, out of my carefully constructed shell. I’m going to have to change my convention plans for the next couple of years. It’s helped me look at a wider picture of what being a professional writer actually means.

Those three things all have something in common. I made a choice to pull my head out of my…keyboard. I got involved with things that I would normally turn my back on. I took chances and accepted opportunities I would normally have ignored. I got involved with people with whom I seemed to share little in common.

So this year, I’m thankful for all the people who helped me through the last 12 months. The Smarter Artists. The Dizzy Dragons. The SFWA folks.

I’m also thankful to the RMFW community as a whole. I’ve been writing this column on the second Friday of the month since April 2016. It’s been a pain trying to come up with a topic some months, but it’s also been a blessing. It’s forced me to stop and think about my practice and what parts of it might be applicable to others. It’s made me look at the wider world through new eyes. It’s given me the opportunity to introduce writers to the indie world from the inside.

And it’s made me grateful that I’ve found such a wonderful tribe of fellow wordsmiths so close to my home.

What are you thankful for?

Image credit: Me. Taken October 16, 2014.