Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Getting Away With It?

When did I think I could get away with professionally editing, without writing first?

I'm not certain when the idea first came into my head. I switched majors in college five times till I found myself comfortably studying English and literature. It was easy, the questions could be argued, and I always figured that at the very least that I could later attend law school. However, my real focus was to become an editor. After all who wouldn't love to read submissions on a daily basis and find the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nora Roberts, or George R. R. Martin?

As you can see, I have a wide range of tastes, It's certainly wider than the respective author's genres above. I thought the job would be ideal. I'm just not certain when I thought I could get away with being the gate keeper to such writers, without first offering up a smidgen of my own work. I've always had these glorified views about how things work, and I didn't have any professionals to guide me or give me a reality check.

I had never been a member of the college paper and I never bothered to volunteer a column. I wrote in a writing circle, but that only lasted one year before it fell apart in my Junior year of college. Of course I wrote analysis papers for my classes, but in the end the only thing remotely professional I could claim was a short piece of fiction that I got published in the schools annual PRISM writing contest. Even then I only got second place to a well accomplished friend who blew the competition away that year. He won something like three first place awards.

I should say, that I was an active college student. It wasn't like I was a good for nothing. I stayed active with Sigma Tau Delta, the National English Honors Association, and worked at school twenty-two hours a week on top of being a full time student. 

You would think at some point I would have woken up from my fantasy and realized that this was not all going to work out as I had envisioned. 

So, here I am, an intern with Penumbra eMag and I've been writing. Doing interviews and attempting to develop a column on early writing. It hasn't been accepted yet, but it is in the works. It's a bit of a hilarious mess really, but I'm going to figure it out and make this thing work. 

I'll have to learn to write for the masses, explore the tools available to me, and fight that tick I got in college called procrastination. This is my attempt to start publicly writing and to move myself into the mentality of writing for the masses. I may have interesting stories or little tid-bitts of information to share. But here it is November, National Novel Writing Month, and I figure this is the best time to give a professional writing career a serious go.

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