So am I, heh. This year's project is to develop my pitching skills. One of our local writing conferences includes three agent/publisher pitches and blue pencil sessions. I'll get some experience with my existing manuscripts, which won't really be ready for a few more years, but I think it's better to develop the business skills in parallel to the craft skills rather than be standing around with manuscripts not sure what to do with them. Target date for career change is July 1st, 2023, so just over 3 years left to get this stuff sorted out. Feels doable.
Okay. Fair enough. Sorry if I was insulting. I've done some reinventing too. From logger to fisherman to journalist to retiree. Lots of fiction manuscripts in the closet and on the hard drive too and not a single story or novel sold yet at the age of 66. Don't have the mercantile skills.
I apologize if I overreacted. And I appreciate the stereotype is real - some people conflate creative careers with hobbies.
At 16 I was writing truly appalling detective novels, and the scary thing was, I actually finished two of them. I found the first one I did last year, printed and bound by myself. It was so bad I wasn't able to read it without cringing, so I actually took it outside and burnt it.
At sixteen... I was writing before that, but since there's no physical proof of anything written before I turned eighteen... I'm going to assume that I was marginally worse at sixteen than I was at eighteen. And what I had written at eighteen was cringe. I wrote my surviving high school writings in script form, because I guess that I thought that that was the best way to write comedy or something. But I believe that I was at the height of my prolific writings at 23-24, due to the freedom of not living in a crowded house. And I'm still better now than I was then. But at sixteen? Hell no! I'm secretly glad that I don't have surviving writings from that time.
I can sum that up very efficiently: "Ooh, laserguns are a cool and the girls in my class are really hot. I need to combine this."
I started writing a diary at around the age of 13. I was into reading and writing books and at the time I was inspired by that book “The Diary of Anne Frank” - that was talked about in English class. She was only 13 years old when she was writing her diary and she inspired me to start writing one too. I would keep up the writing once every 3-4 days - depending on how exciting my days were and how much I needed to “remember”. It was such a joy reading back on experiences long forgotten and you won’t believe the all the details we forget about 1-2 months down the line when you don’t keep a diary. I stopped keeping a diary at around 19 and disregarded it and cast it aside in a plastic bag stored in the attic somewhere. Maintained an active interest in it. If not in writing, then in reading what others write, certainly.