Poking around my website (which so far it appears only I do), a reader might notice there is very little information about me. The eponymous page consists of about three sentences that might apply to millions of other people in the world. And my blog, rather than sharing the intimate details of my own life, is more geared toward my writing than myself.
All of this is by design. Like many writers, I am a private person. I suffer a bit from social anxiety, although the older I get the less I care what others think of me, at least personally. But I find that I care very much what others think of my writing. The act of writing itself seems to be the one thing on which my contentment in life hinges. Apart from my husband, it is my sole motivator to get through the day and finish the things I have to do to survive (aka work), so I can do what I need to do. And what I need to do is write. I live for it. My brain is a tangle of plots, characters, strange worlds, vast cities, barren deserts, lush forests, sleek spaceships, and epic love affairs. Most of the time, writing is all I think about (sorry, babe). If you asked anyone who truly knows me what my passion is, there can only ever be one answer.
I. AM. A. WRITER.
But I’m not. Not really. Because what I’m finally starting to accept (after reading it many times from others) is that there’s a hell of a lot more to being a writer than writing. There’s marketing and connecting and networking and advertising, and I am not a marketing executive, a social media maven, or an advertiser. To me, this next stage is my Everest, and I have no sherpa and no climbing gear and no idea what the hell I’m doing up on this slope. And do you know what the weird thing is?
I’m really fucking excited about it.
I mean, OK, realistically I know that I will probably never be able to quit my job and write books all day for millions of adoring fans. I may never even get a hundred people to read what I write. And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me sad, or that being the next J.K. Rowling isn’t my dream. Of course it is. It’s every writer’s dream. In an ideal world where I actually get to do what I love for a living, I am cranking out prose 10 hours a day, every day. But if that never happens–and again, I realize it probably won’t–I am not going to stop writing. I’m never going to stop doing what I’m passionate about. And I will never stop reading, never stop dreaming and imagining and filling invisible worlds with characters I love and hate. Each of them has something of myself in them, and each has many other things that are wholly theirs. That’s what writers do. We breathe life into nothingness, and whether or not anyone ever cares about our work, I think what we do is pretty damn cool.
I am an artist. I am a creator. I am a WRITER.
Even if nobody ever knows.
Katia Cole 