Good News! My mom’s a subscriber!

You know all’s right in the world when you can count on your mom to buy your art for a quarter.

And that makes five subscribers, with Kate, Ian, Max and Tennille making up the balance. That’s a 100% conversion rate, for anyone keeping track. Hey, and I thought I couldn’t sell!

It occurred to me this morning how excited I am about this experiment, and how this has got me excited about writing the book again, where it had felt like a chore for the last couple months. I was looking back on the teenage years I spent playing role-playing games, and thinking about how the reason I enjoy ‘having written’ more than ‘writing’ is because, to me, the point is the story-telling. The storytelling necessarily involves an interaction between the teller and the listener, and you can’t enjoy that interaction until you ‘have written’, though you can anticipate it when you’re writing.

I’ve known of a lot of authors who don’t want to share their book until it’s done, but that just hasn’t worked for me. What energizes me about writing is that mental dialogue with the audience - real or imagined.

In his book, On Writing, Stephen King talks about how you should write for a single person that represents your ideal audience. I think in trying to write a full novel I was having trouble with that, because I do want this published eventually, so I got caught up in imagining the eventual faceless crowd that I want this to be read by, and because the ‘eventual’ part of that imagining is so far off. The whole thing was too vague, I pretty much couldn’t envision an audience at all.

So opting to share the writing process has given me my mental audience. Now, when I think about writing, I can quite specifically imagine my audience. And I predict that will make a big difference to my enjoyment of the writing.

Installment 2 is coming today. And that will pretty much have published everything I had written before this experiment began. Then, new words for Monday.