Finding Myself

Who am I? What am I? Where am I? How do I go about finding my voice? What makes me unique? Where is that "empty spot" that I need to fill?I have been trying to find my place. Where do I belong? How am I going to get there? What makes me special? It all seems close and then at other times, far, far away.

This blog is more personal than other-person driven.

Most of my life, I have wanted to write for children. I want to make them laugh. I want them to sit with wonder in their eyes and take in every word. I have always wanted children to pick up my book and love it, too.

I don't consider myself a selfish person, but I have always wanted that acceptance.

Children are so easy to please. It does not take a lot. Just giving them a little attention does a lot. They trust. They listen. They explore. They wonder. They are children.

I am looking at my book ideas and thinking, "what makes my ideas different?" What do I offer that other authors do not offer? What advantage do I bring to the table that someone else does not have? Why would someone choose to pick my book off the shelf over another book? I am still thinking about these things. If I come up with an answer, I will share it.

Give your work the same view and let me know what you come up with in that department.

Want to know what else I want to do? I want to write a vampire novel for teens. That might sound really weird, but I have loved vampire movies and books for most of my life. I want to write for teens. I want to do it. I have to do it.

I found something interesting by Stephen King. He was giving a ten minute thing on how to write a novel.

He said this: "You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it ... but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off." - Stephen King

I wanted to share this comment. Sometimes, I get wrapped-up in stuff, when I need to write. I just need to blinking write.