Musings of an old Newbie

When I first decided that I was going to write for a living, I was in my 20's and full of fresh ideas.  I considered myself to be the quintessential wordsmith of my neighborhood.  I was doing the poetry circuit around the greater Detroit Area, was reading at coffee houses, and had numerous poems and articles in anthologies and newspapers.  Once, I even had an editorial piece I did for a local newspaper read in a 4th grade class by my boss's son.  She was very impressed and called my phone from her office to tell me how even more impressed her son's teacher and classmates were with my essay.  Wow, I thought, this could be the beginning of something amazing. 

Fast forward to the present, and I'm still waiting for the beginning of the amazing thing to happen.  The difference is that now, at the tender age of 52, I realize that your dreams can take more work to accomplish than the everyday grind so many of us are trying to free ourselves from.  Routine, sister to familiarity and her evil twin, procrastination, can also breed contempt; either for change, or for altering what has over a period of a lifetime, become the norm.

In the day of the superfast information highway known as the internet (boy, that Al Gore is really something, isn't he?), you would think that it'd be pretty easy to get the word out about your products and/or services.  Well it is, for those people who are highly adept at (oh, how I hate this dreaded term) MARKETING.

Marketing, the nightmare of every creative person whose only wish is to create and have people knocking down one's door for the next fabulous creation of the century.  Add social networking to the pot and according to the experts, you have a whole new arena of potential customers, patrons, or whatever terminology you want to use.  For some, at least according to the millions of emails I get from the marketing gurus, this new area of business networking is the best thing since ketchup.  For me, it simply means more work than I had initially anticipated.

All griping aside, I'm fairly excited about my new choice of careers.  I am a writer and have been since I was 8 years old.  I created my own comic books and wrote lyrics to go with instrumental songs I'd hear on the radio.  And now, after a mere 46 years, I've finally decided that I'm willing to do whatever it takes, marketing wise, to get my work out there.  I sold my first short story as a ghostwriter last week. And I've just uploaded a collection of poetry for Kindle on Amazon.com and on Smashwords.com entitled, Affirmations: and Other Poems, under the pen name Cherrie Lynn.  I'll be featuring the book here on my blog as well for sale as an ebook.

This blog was created to share my writing dreams, aspirations, triumphs and failures, as the case may be. And once I make that transition to becoming the next J.K. Rowling, you'll all be my witnesses;)