Lately I've been spending an exuberant amount of time on my work, and as I've mentioned in earlier posts, more or less ignoring everyone I know in the process.
Now what do I mean by exuberant amount of time? Obviously I mean the bare minimum amount of time I can put into something while taking an online Philosophy class and working part (full) time at a hotel as a front desk agent and bartender.
In other words, I've gotten soft and lazy over a good-ish paycheck while trying to write the end of my book. (Also, I'm pretty much done with that now, and I'll be editing it in August- which is a weird thought.)
But by now you're probably wondering, why is this titled "Starting Before You're Ready"? Isn't that a kind of ridiculous name for some kind of open letter?
Yes, yes it is.
So, here goes.
Yesterday I submitted my work to a writing competition for the first time. Not much is at stake here, and I don't think I'll win by a long shot considering what I'm up against.
But for me this is a huge milestone.
It's putting my work out there to be scrutinized not by well meaning individuals, but by those willing to pay for my work. In other words, it is stepping out and into the real world of writing before I am even ready to be out there.
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And you could say, "wait a tec, Alexander, You've been working on this book of yours for almost a year now (if you include the three months I had to shelve it to get through my last semester at school, when I didn't write at all), and you started writing almost two years ago, by now you should be ready to actually submit work for your livelihood, no?"
No, you are exactly incorrect. When I started writing, I had no clue what I was doing, and sure I wrote a very long story with hopes of connecting the very separate (but always lumped together) science fiction and fantasy worlds, I was chewing on a seven-book project from hell that was doomed to begin with.
I had no idea what a story was, and no real ability to learn it.
So I started before I was ready and learned so much that I violently scrapped the project and never looked at it again.
And now I'm caught in my current work, a space odyssey that is well over five hundred pages long and not getting any shorter, at least until I tear it apart and make it read-worthy.
But does that make me ready to submit my work to the public for monetary feedback? Hell no. In fact, I am not at all skilled enough a writer to submit to competitions. So why would I even try? Because of a principle that got me almost everything I have in life:
Starting before you're ready.
Was I ready to speak Chinese at work with customers and coworkers to accomplish all the goals of hospitality and the service industry? Absolutely not, and my awful excuse for a standard working fluency in Chinese has never been better.
Was I ready for my advanced Japanese class, where I would have to formulate ideas in complex sentences and give opinions in near- fluency level detail after only a year and a half of studying Japanese? No, not in the slightest, but my B in the class is a tribute to the work I put into it with significant help from my tutors and professor, and my essays for that class are some of the best writings I've ever created.
And so I've decided to do the same thing with my work, and will regularly submit my writing until it is good enough to make money, until it does what I want it to do.
You see, I want to make people think, and feel. I want people to laugh from words on paper that I wrote, to tear up and vomit profusely at the situations I put their innocent fictional friends in. I want to write from the heart and be able to touch the hearts of those who see my work. And I want to write so much that my work pervades the air.
Hopefully, with the help of my readers who care so much about their own lives and work so hard to attain the betterment of our world, I can achieve such things, but to do that I have to do things before I'm ready.
Of course I will be uploading all of the submitted stories rejected and accepted to abkshorts for you all to enjoy or hate, whichever is preferable.
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On another note, I would like to bring up my translation portfolio blog. The few people who have seen it may be wondering- what the hell Zander, you promised weekly posts and even a whole novel translation! Are you seriously that lazy?
Firstly, yes I am extremely lazy.
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Secondly, as far as legality goes, I would rather either translate my own work, or better yet, submit original work there. After much thought I came to a decision. On that blog you will soon find my ramblings in Chinese and Japanese and eventually whatever other languages I decide to study. My translation of that novel will be removed and probably completed in private.
Everything I post will be my own work and translated into English so that it can be scrutinized by my readers. It's updates will be posted to websites that are accessible to speakers of the various languages I'm learning.
I beg an hope for violent merciless feedback so that I can edit my own work and make it perfect.
That means that everything I post there, so long as people point out my mistakes, will actually improve over time, and so a post I wrote five years ago might be a completely different post today! I think it's a great way to learn a language, especially in our modern world, and I love being wrong as often as possible so that I can be right later on down the road. So my Japanese and Chinese speaking friends, please tear my work apart so that I can talk with you more easily.
On that note, I love you all. Have a fantastic day!
Love,
-Alexander
