Simple Mystery

All right, this post will be my last love letter to Orson Scott Card and his Boot Camp, I promise.  At least for a while.

I’ve been thinking about the lessons I would take away from Boot Camp.  And I think they come down to three big ideas I am walking away with:

A book is not a precious thing

One thing I learned last week is that I can come up with five good story ideas like that. *snaps fingers*  And I can write a story like that.  Which probably means I can write a book like… well, I guess probably like thaaaat.  But you know, pretty quick.

I do not have to treat my book, or any other I write, as a precious artifact to be husbanded, honored, and shielded from all mistreatment.  If I screw it up somehow in my efforts to get it published?  Sucks, but I can write a new one.  If I never get it on the shelf?  Same deal.  I will treat my work with respect, but I will understand that there is always more where it came from.

I have a career

I have been treating myself like a person who hopes to join a profession.  But the fact is, I have joined it.  Getting published and making sales are obviously huge parts of my job, parts I have not mastered yet.  But they are not the things that make me a writer.

I will no longer be ashamed to call myself a writer or to answer questions about it.  I will no longer apologize, with my attitude or with little self-deprecating jokes, for not yet being published.

I am a writer.  I write.  That’s what I do.

I am not going back

I have returned to my home, of course, but I am not going back to the life I lived before Boot Camp.  A life where I fear my work, worry about it, and put it off.  I am going to do everything I must to stay in the Boot Camp mentality, where I work very hard and am exhausted and happy.

One idea I have is to designate the first and second of each month as “Story Days,” during which I’ll do a repeat of the Boot Camp assignments to construct five story seeds and write one story.  But I think the biggest thing that will keep me in this mentality is just the knowledge that I can exist there, and the memory of what it can give me.

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So, maybe this is three ways of saying essentially the same thing.  Whatever.  Suffice it to say that I feel I have returned to Atlanta a changed woman..