My pride is temporarily giving me permission to be awkward and embarrassingly forward in a public forum so that I can do something I badly need to: reach out to people I might just have something in common with, introduce myself, and perhaps strike up a friendship or two. Here goes. Be warned that this has not been well edited. I’m superficially easy to hate. I have an almost perfect life, one many writers dream of having, but I mostly squander it in directionless indulgence. I’m an Australian and I am 33 years old, so it has been a while since I reached the magical age of 30, when I’ve heard you become qualified to write something that is not puerile. I have seen a lot of the world - I’ve spent most of my young adulthood travelling. I live on a beautiful tropical island with my wonderful husband, who supports me in everything I do, and I have a skill that lets me work just 1-2 days each month and the rest of my time is my own. I have a pretty, quiet little house in a beautiful garden. My housekeeper and gardener keep them beautiful for me. Today everything smells like frangipanis and vanilla. I don’t have friends. Where I live people drop in for 2 weeks to lie in the sun and drink a lot in beach bars and then they go home. I love the local people, but the cultural and economic gap between us is HUGE (and even if I try to make it not matter, it does). My husband is amazing, and he stands in for all the girlfriends I might have if we lived at home, but that’s not really fair to a man, is it? There are writers groups for tourists and expatriates here, but I wouldn’t read Eat Pray Love if you stapled it to my face, so I don’t really fit in there either... I’ve never sat down and finished a novel. I write a lot of short stories, but that’s not what I want to do. I still think of myself as belonging to “that other career” - the one I loathe, that I struggled for a decade to extricate myself from - because that’s where the money is. That’s mostly my excuse for not committing to writing. It’s also one of the reasons I have so few friends. I spent so long surrounded by people I had few interests in common with. I certainly don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for me. I’m grateful every day for the incredible easiness of my life. It hasn’t always been that way - not even close. I’m not really a forums person to be honest. A big pool of anonymous responses just makes me feel lonely. I want to connect with individuals, I want to listen to you, and discuss writing as often as possible and try to form a connection of trust and understanding - a friendship. I couldn’t share my writing in progress with anyone but a friend. For me writing is a skill, a difficult one, but one that is intimately linked to emotions. If I let all the emotional charge that writing brings fall on my husband’s ears and talk to him non-stop about everything that happens for me when I write, well, he’ll probably put up with it and try to look interested, that’s the kind of guy he is. But if you could help him share the load and you want someone to dump stuff on too, then contact me, I’d love to hear from you. Truthfully, I’m just sitting around waiting for you to email. Recently, (well, yesterday,) I decided I’m going to write every day and that I will dedicate the next 6 months of my life to finishing a novel “come hell or high water”. I’ve started reading books on writing again and I’m so excited about all the ideas they give me and I just want to share... and I look around, and my cat looks blinks back at me, and I shut my mouth and keep typing. Sorry if that was a bit personal for this kind of thing - I’m socially out of touch! (PS: In the first part of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ memoirs he says that the greatest early improvement he made to his writing was to remove the Spanish equivalent of all words ending in “ly”. So you can just pretend I didn’t use them in my subject AND first sentence).
Welcome to Writing Forums, harimau! I hope you find what you're looking for here, whatever your interests in writing. This forum aims to provide the best workshopping resources on the internet, and to that end we have a few rules which you should familiarise yourself with before you get stuck in. The main section of the site is the Writing Workshop, where members can post their writing in order to receive critique of their work. However, before we allow members to post their work, they must have met some basic requirements. Firstly, you must have been a member for fourteen days, and have made twenty posts on the forum overall (please note, posts in Word Games do not count towards this). This is so that members, when they post their work, have familiarised themselves with the forums and contributed to them (as well as hopefully learned something for themselves). Secondly, members must provide two constructive reviews of other people's work for each piece of their own that they wish to post. This is because we believe that the focus of workshopping should be equally upon giving reviews as receiving them, as they allow a writer to practice and improve their editing skills, which they can then apply to their own writing. Beyond the Writing Workshop, you will find that we have extensive forums for discussion of aspects of writing, as well as a community area for general discussion. We also run periodic short story and poetry contests, which are good for challenging yourself and expanding your skills. If you have any questions or problems, then the moderators (myself, Cogito, Lemex and Dante Dases) should be your first port of call. Any technical problems with the site itself should be directed to Daniel, the site administrator and owner. I would recommend you have a look over the rules so that you know what to expect, and what is expected. But aside from that, I hope you enjoy your time here. Banzai
Welcome Harimau, You made a very heartfelt intro there, I particular like the following: You'll find this forum very friendly, with a diverse range of writing styles, word games, genres, etc., I'm sure you'll find something to suit your needs.
"I wouldn’t read Eat Pray Love if you stapled it to my face" haha I love that line! I tried reading it, it was awful. The movie was worse. Welcome!
Cazann & Fairydust - thank you so much for your welcomes. I am glad my antipathy towards eat pray love made you smile. I've so far managed to avoid both book and movie but I've seen enough of the "phenomenon" to know that's for the best. I hope to see you around
Harimau, What is writing if not putting your personal observations and frustrations out there to be caught by (at least) one random soul? That's the really tricky part--like sending your kid to preschool and praying both of you will be all right. I think everyone on this site is brave. A word of advice, if I may: If you are serious about writing a novel, you must write about something that matters so much to you that can't not write it. For me, my story dances though my brain even when I'm thinking of something else and taunts, "Follow me" as it dances away. I find that working on a story that won't leave me alone for long gives me confidence that it will direct me on those days when I sit down at this laptop and want to do anything else but write. Then my characters come out to play and I'm okay. Writing has to be one of the most solitary experiences on Earth. It is a good thing you are reaching out to others. SJ Wonder
