Angela Nicole Parker

I recently got my Happy back, actually I stumbled into it with the click of a mouse. I was clicking through some old websites that I bookmarked when I clicked on a blog I use to visit often. The web mistress had recently self-published her first book and the euphoria that she felt was so real that it seeped through the computer screen and into me. My mind went to all the writing projects that I have been back burning or putting off because I've been afraid my words, my babies, just weren't good enough for publication and never would be and I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then did something I had not done in a while --- wrote for fun. It was a one page bit of nothing, but it was enough to get my creative juices flowing and to get me to reeavluate my work and how I saw myself as a writer.

Once upon a time I always wrote for fun. I was that kid in first grade who wrote a short story with my spelling words when only a sentence was required. I was writing fan fiction as a kid, before it was it's own genre. I wrote for the thrill of it.I wrote because it felt unatural not too.

Tethered was a blast to write and a nightmare to try and sell and I think that's when I started to lose a bit of my Happy when it came to writing. The Publishing business is brutal game and I think I have been so wrapped up in how I am going to sell Tethered and all my other manuscripts, both born and unborn, that I lost confidence. My writing became a business that I feared I'd never be able to get afloat.

I was beaten and when my dream of publishing Tethered  finally happened, I didn't scream for joy like I should have because it didn't happen the way I always imagined. I realized now how stupid that was. I became a writer not to hitch my star to a publishing house, but share my stories with others. After all, a writer writes...

Since this revelation I have been writing and revising my ass off. I've also restarted my column Under the Hill, a quirky little blurb about life as a thirty-something singleton.  And I can't remeber the last time I've been this happy. I also decided to self-publish some of my manuscripts as ebooks, a brave new world for me, indeed!

Writers never tell you how much pain is in the profession --- how each rejection cuts at you like a knife, and each story that you feel you cannot tell gnaws at you from the inside. But as painful a process it can be, it's also bliss. There is nothing more fufilling then to see your world come to life and to hear that somebody else likes your people and places as much as you do.

Us writers are a peculiar lot, we put ourselves out there and submit ourselves to so many slings and arrows that sometimes we forget why we are bleeding. I don't mind suffering for my art some time, because when I'm in the zone and I'm at one with my work, I am the most happy little writer of them all.