Changing Your Universe

I'd like to welcome Aaron Ritchey, fellow Crescent Moon Press author to Changing Your Universe!

We're all the sum total of our life experiences, but there are moments when someone or something affects us, possibly even influences the direction our lives will take. Sometimes, just being grateful for the life path we're on is enough. Here is one of those stories.

The Happy Writer – Seven Things I’m Grateful For

Thank you to Renee Rearden for letting me crash her blog and spread the disease that is my blogging.  Incurable.  Mostly when I blog I talk about the angst and the gnashing of the teeth of the writer’s life, but I wanted to change things up for this post. 

I’ve spent the last twenty years complaining and shaking my fist at the heavens for being cursed with the desire to write books.  Yet, if the writing game didn’t have any rewards, well, I think I would’ve stopped playing a long time ago.  I think I would, but I don’t know.  I have a masochistic streak.  Hit me baby one more time.

So I want to do a list of the seven things I am grateful for right now in my writing journey:

1)       I am so grateful for my publisher, Crescent Moon Press, for my cover art, the design of my book, the finished final product of my debut novel, The Never Prayer.  I’ve seen other small presses release books that look like they’ve been photocopied.  Poorly.  Not my book.  My book glows righteously.

2)      So I’ve written twelve or thirteen books, I lose track, but I’m glad I debuted with The Never Prayer, an angel\demon story which is so unique and yet still marketable.  Lord knows the first books I wrote, surreal Postmodern fantasy adventures (think David Lynch meets Lord of the Rings) were unique, but not so marketable.  I’m proud that The Never Prayer is my first book.  Every round of edits, I laughed, I cried, in all the right places.

3)      At every turn in the writing game, I’ve been blessed with wonderful people who’ve supported me, from poor unpublished writer schmoes to elite literary agents to bestselling writers.  I have been involved in wonderful critique groups that have shaped me and challenged me to be my best.

4)      I feel very lucky to have social skills.  Now, I had to learn them the hard way which involved lots of awkward moments when I said the wrong thing, in a loud voice, at the wrong time, naked.  But I learned.  A lot of writers don’t have social skills, but I’ll tell you this, if I can learn how to be social (and clothed) you can too.

5)      I am thankful for the writing skills that seem to have come naturally to me.  I needed help with my actual writing, I can get so purply and wordy at times, and I needed to learn story structure, but creating characters seems to have come naturally to me and people remember my characters.  As my friend says, they are sticky and sticky characters are the best characters.  Get your minds out of the gutter.

6)      I am grateful that after years of suffering, I enjoy the writing process now.  I can get lost in my stories with my characters and the minutes fly by.  It wasn’t always like that, but I learned to love writing.  It is a special thing to create stories out of nothing, to watch your characters grow and change, to weep with them, to laugh with them—in some ways, writing novels is a divine experience.  I’m glad I learned to like it.

7)      My whole life now really revolves around my writing.  Some of that was conscious choice, but in other ways, it all just kind of happened to me.  I have a wife and family who supports me in my authorial madness and my job gives me the flexibility to pursue this dream. 

So that’s what I’m grateful for today.  And practicing gratitude is so much more rewarding than complaining and gnashing teeth.  Less dental visits as well.

For more about me and The Never Prayer, you can visit us both at www.aaronmritchey.com.  And of course, I’m on Facebook, as is the book at http://www.facebook.com/TheNeverPrayer.  And I tweet - @aaronmritchey.   If you are at all curious about the novel, our friends at Amazon.com would love for you to visit them!

Thanks again, Renee!

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