Leftie Aube’s Writing Podcast | A Podcast for Writers

Episode 1 - My Journey So Far

• Leftie Aubé • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Recorded on July 14th, 2022

In this episode, I go back and share my entire writing journey up to this point. From my first confrontation with rejection in elementary school, to how I believed I was a literary genius in my teenage years & early twenties (and how I was brutally brought back to reality), to my worst writing years and how I got through them!

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SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Lefty Obeys Writing Podcast, where I share with vulnerability and positivity my journey towards making all of my writing dreams come true. I hope you learn with me as I go from the things that go well and what doesn't go so well. But mainly I wish it inspires you to pursue your own writing dreams. Now let's begin. Hello writers! Before we got into the normal format of the episodes, I wanted to start by telling you what was my writing journey so far. Um because in every episode I'm going to start with an update on what I have been doing the previous week. I thought it was only logical to start by going back and telling you what brought me here to this moment, writing-wise. So this episode is going to be the sort of autobiographical episode where I go back in time and tell you what happened in my life related to writing to bring me to this point. A bit like in the beginning of Stevens King on writing. So if that's not the sort of thing that interests you, you can just skip this episode and I don't think like it would matter much. But I know that personally I really enjoy knowing uh the journey of a writer from the very, very beginning and the hardship of the beginning to like what made a difference along the way. Um so that's why I wanted to share it with you. Uh, but uh yeah, if you don't enjoy those sort of things, and maybe I will go a bit long in this episode. So if you just don't like that, just skip this episode and go to the next. No hard feelings. So I was always from the very beginning really into books. I loved reading them even when I could not read them. I liked creating stories for them. I liked playing with any toys that would allow me to create stories, and my parents always encouraged me to develop my imagination, which is something I'm really grateful for. So I was really excited to get into elementary school, or what is the equivalent of elementary school, because I'm in Canada, Quebec. Uh, so maybe like the schooling system is not exactly the same as the one you are in, but uh anyway, when I got into elementary school, I was really excited to learn how to write and read. That was super exciting to me. Um, I got my first rejection when I was like in second grade. We had to write this text, um, and I wrote a story about a snowman because there was a snowman on the wall in front of me. And uh the teacher said she would be reading like the best text in the class, and I was so excited, I really, really wanted to be chosen, and I was not, and I remember how I felt frustrated by that, and how I really wanted to be seen, and I wanted everyone to hear my story because I thought it was so good. So that was my first um encounter with rejection. Then in elementary school, I met an author and discovered that you know books were written by people. But I remember the first time I really said, Oh, I want to be that thing, which is an author, is when our fifth grade, I think, teacher, she was reading us La Comtesse de Ségur, and uh she was telling us the story of the writer of those books who lived like really long ago, like hundreds of years ago. And I remember how impressed I was by that, that we were still talking about that woman because of the story she had written, which we were still reading, and I was like, I wanna get that. Like, I want people to be talking about me like hundreds of years after I'm dead. Uh, so that was the the first moment I really said to myself, I wanna do that, I wanna be a writer. And I kept on loving book through elementary school, but I really fell in love hard with writing, like many with the Harry Potter series, uh, which one teacher introduced us to. And I got my first praise as a writer for my writing when I was in sixth grade. Um, we had to write this Christmas story, and um, the teacher said that my text was the best in the entire class, and she said that I displayed in this story as much imagination as J.K. Rowling in Ireland, and I remember how good I felt, and how I felt like with this, I had tapped into something inside of myself, and it was just so good to have uh someone I respected a lot see that and take the time to tell that, and yeah, that was an important moment for me. It was in high school that I started to write for fun, it was where I started to say that I wanted to be a writer. I got sometimes praised for my writing. Um it was at first like a non-fiction text that the teacher said like she forgot to correct my mistakes because she was so into what I was writing about, so that that was good. Uh but also I got not praise, which hurt my feelings a lot because I knew that writing was my thing by then, and we had like this class of a French class where we had to write a short story. It was the class where we learned how to write short stories, and I was like, Okay, I'm gonna nail this, this is my thing, and I wrote this story, and like it didn't get such a good grade, and my teacher didn't say anything, and again, they were reading the best stories in front of the class, and mine wasn't chosen. So I remember like I was this is supposed to be my thing. Why are the other people who do not care about writing get picked up then not me? Um, so then that was hard, and at that time I was also really bad at grammar, like really, really bad. Um, so yeah, that was something that was bringing me down. But at the end of high school in my English class, uh the very last text we had to write, we had to choose between writing a short story imaginative or like a nonfiction text. And I chose to write a short story. Um, and I got a perfect score for that story. I did absolutely no grammar mistake, and she said the story was so compelling, and she had never given a perfect score in her entire teaching career. Um, and even not for that last text, which was like the most important of the year. And I should have understood at that time that writing in English was uh a great idea for me, but somehow I didn't because um in Quebec, if you do not know, we speak French, so all the this time I was like writing and reading in French, it was my my main, it is my main language, um, but I was writing it in French, but uh for this first text that I wrote in English, I got like this big praise. And um looking back, it was like the first time I had that I was supposed to write in English. So in between iSchool and what would be like college, I think for Americans, it's called Sejip here. Um that's where I started to work on my first novel because before in iSchool, all I did was write beginning of stories and never got really far with it. Um, but I started working on my first novel, which was a horror novel. Again, like I was drawn to the writing right away. I should have known. Uh, it was a haunted house story, which I still really love. It was inspired by my aunt's house uh that I loved so much at the time. It was an old house, and I just pictured the story in my head when I got in. Um so I worked, I don't remember how long on this story. Uh I finished it, I stopped, I didn't finish it. I stopped writing it at about the 30,000 mark, which is looking back like a lot. Um, but I did not finish it. Um I still want to go back to that story. There was something in there. There is something there. Um and during that time too, I was studying um science because I wanted to go to university in something related to science, but really I was searching for myself. I didn't know really what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a physicist or a therapist or you know, anything. The only thing I was sure about was writing, but I still knew that I needed to get a real job. Uh so I did not really know what I wanted to do. Uh, but during that time, you know, I was young, I was like 16, 17, and I was convinced that I was a literary genius. Like I was convinced that my first book would be an automatic success, that I would get like a best seller in Stanley and all of this. Um during that time I did my first uh contest in writing. I wrote this short story about a dog and I submitted it to a literary contest uh in French again. And um I got such a bad score for it, like such a bad score. The only thing that I got like remotely some points because they were really giving points on all the elements of the story, and the only part I get I got like a decent score, which was not even good, was like that my story worked with the theme of the contest, which is like so lame. Um I was really really broken down by this because I was supposed to be a literary genius, remember? So I was really brought down by this, and it turned out that one of my friends from iSchool got won the contest, and I was like really mad at him. By the end of that first Seje period, I knew that I wanted really to be a writer, and I managed with uh the amazing Lin, which was my boss at the time. I was working in um library in my old elementary school, and she was a writer too, and we were talking about writing, and she really wanted me to pursue it. She really wanted me to make this dream come true, and she was close with my mother, and she managed to convince my mother to let me go and get one year of university a certificate in creative writing. Um, she managed to convince my parents to pay for this for me, uh, so that I could do that before I got you know a real degree and something that would give me a real job. Um so she managed to do that. So by the end of my college, uh the first time, it was two years uh for this program, um, I knew that I really wanted to be a writer. So I did one class of creative writing with a friend just to see what it looked like. And I wrote a text in that class and the teacher praised it. So I was like, again, you know, you see, I'm a literary genius. So I submitted it to this literary magazine that I had never even read. And uh I got my first rejection letter, of course, because you know, this I I've never been literary, I will never be. And I was trying to play in a sandbox that was not for me. Um, I remember I got so mad at this rejection letter, like so, so, so mad that I deleted the email, which I'm so sad about. I wish I still had that first rejection letter. So after the CEGEP came the certificate in creative writing at Laval University, this was such an experience of immersing myself in writing for a whole year. This was my purpose, and I felt like I was in the right spot at the right time. I'm still, I need to say, I'm so grateful for my parents that they pay for this year for me. Like, I should tell them again. I I have already told them, but I should tell them again. Um, this read me learn a lot. I learned to critic other stories, and I learned how to receive critics, which was really the hardest part of this for me, especially at first. Like I remember the first critique group we had. I went to my teacher at the end of the class because I was so hurt by what the people had said, and like those girls were so nice, like I was sad at the end of the class not to work with them anymore. They were not the problem. I was a problem. So I went and went to my teacher and I said, Could you just read this first text and tell me what you think? Because I thought that the girls were wrong completely. Like, again, remember I'm still a literary genius in my head at this point, despite all of the rejection I got and the bad score and everything. Um, and you know, my teacher who was Neil Bizendat, which he was so amazing, um, he took the time to read the text and he said, you know, yes, there is good things in there, but there is those other things that do not work so well. And uh they were aligning with what the critic group had said, so that helped me to get better at just taking in the critique. So I think that was the biggest thing that this certificate brought me. It made me write a lot, which is amazing. It made me read a lot. I got a lot of praise from some teachers, but mostly like the most praise I got was from this teacher from Neil. And I remember I met it, I met him at the end of the certificate, uh, because I said, you know, I really want to make this. Do you think I have what it takes? And he said that I had the passion and the fire, and that it was the most important thing to make it as a writer. And I he was so right. I still I believe that too now. I really do that the fire, the passion is the most important component. You don't need talent, which I think you can see from what I said that I had no particular big talent in writing, other than I think imagination. Like, I think this is my natural talent in writing, but other than that, like I was not a literary genius. Um, but you know, he saw something in me and he said, you know, you can write me back if you ever need. Um and yeah, during that period of time I started working on some novels in the contest of context of the class. Uh, novels that I did not finish, like everything before that, except like some short stories. And I remember one teacher at the very beginning of the certificate said, you know, you're going to write so much during this year, but you're not, you're mostly not going to use any of it. Like, mostly for all of you in this class, you will not publish anything you are writing in this class. And I remember when I heard him say that, I was like, no, it's impossible. Like, every word I put on paper, I will try and manage to get published. I really believe that. And you know, it turned out that this teacher was right. I never published anything I wrote during that time. And but it doesn't mean that the writing I did read that period of time didn't mean anything or didn't sum up to anything, which I thought at this period of time that if you did not publish what you were writing, like it was meaningless and it cannot be it cannot be farther from the truth. So when I got out of the certificate in creative writing, I decided to take a year off school because I had no idea of what I wanted to do next. Um, at the end of my certificate in creative writing, I had um met with a counselor, I think that's how we say that, uh, to decide what my career could be. And it was not the first time I was doing this process. And basically, like all of the counselor before him, he didn't manage to really find something that really fit with me. And at the end, he was like, But what do you really want to do? Like he knew that I knew deep down, and I said, I want to be a writer, and he said, Then just go and be a writer, and that was the last meeting I had with that counselor. Uh so but I knew that I needed to get a real job to actually pay the bills. Like, um, I knew that even if I had this conviction inside of me that I was going to be a full-time writer one day, I still knew that it was something that took time and that I had to support myself until I got to that point. I did not want it to be a burden on my partner or my parents as I was trying to make it as a writer. Um, but I also did not want it to just go straight into another program, not really knowing what I wanted to do. Um, and at first my parents were not super happy with this decision. Uh, but I think that in the end, uh I think that they would say now that it was the right decision to take. During that year, I was working in a bookstore for most of the time, and I really enjoyed that day job. Um, and I also had lots of true free time. Looking back, it was the period in my entire life where I had the most free time available to write, and my vision for that year would be that I would spend so much time writing that I would not need to go back to school and I would just be like a full-time writer at the end of this year. But I couldn't not have been more far from the truth. So, just to situate you a little bit, at this time we were like September 2011, and I was 20 years old, going on 21. Um, and that was really my darkest writing period going back. I had so much resistance, I was wasting so much time, it was crazy. I was just starting beginnings of tax, but not really doing anything with them. Um, it was the first time that I started keeping uh writing notebook, and actually to write this little timeline in the story to tell you that I dig back into my writing journals. I went back into the tracking I was doing. So at that period of time I was not tracking my writing because I was not writing, but I was writing about writing. So I was writing about what I was feeling, and it was really dark. I really did not know why I wasn't able to write, and I did not have at that time a word for resistance, so I was really blaming myself a lot. I came out of that super dark place, not completely, but the what allowed me to get out of that place was Nanoraimo. It really changed my life doing Nanoraimo that year. So I discovered Nanoraimo because I was searching online for contests to submit my writing to as a way to motivate myself to finish a short story, and I saw someone. Saying they had won Nanoraimo, and at that time I was really seeking external um validation on my work, so winning a contest really felt like a big deal. So when I saw that, I went and looked into Nanoraimo, and I was really disappointed to know that like everyone could win Nanoraimo quite easily. Um not easily. I didn't know at the time that it was not easy, but it what it looked like to my 20 years old self. Um, so I decided to do the challenge with uh two of my writing friends at the time. Uh, you know who you are, and I love you two so much for doing this challenge with me. It was so fun. We're always going at the Starbucks writing together, and NanoReamo did a lot to me. No matter what people say about it and the bad narrative that there are around it, I still think that this could be the thing that helped you so much in your writing career. So if you haven't tried it, and if you have never finished a first draft, I really encourage you to try to do this challenge. For me, it was what helped me finish my first draft ever, which I had never managed to do, and I really thought I could never be able to do. It's what taught me to write a shitty first draft, a fast first draft where I didn't overthink every single word. It really helped me a lot. Um, so I should do like a full episode of Nanoraimo, but it was a really a milestone in my writing career. But coming out of Nanoraimo, knowing that I had all that time available to write, I was super pumped and I was like, okay, I'm going to edit that novel and I'm going to publish it and I'm going to be a published author. But resisted it again. Because really, I did not know what I was doing. And I don't know if they weren't available, or I just did not find them, but I had no resource, I had no mentor, I had no one to tell me how I was actually supposed to edit a novel. And while I had her learned a lot during my year in certificate in creative writing, and one of my teachers did tell us about editing, it was not like an actionable process that I could apply. So I was really lost during that time. And because I was so lost, resisting it again. So at some point I realized that you know I needed to find uh a day job, like I said, to support myself, because frankly, I was not going to be a full-time writer during that year. So I decided to go and do what we call air a technique, um, technical study, maybe, um, to become a documentation technician. So uh this job is basically you work either for a company managing their paperwork and filing them so people can find it easily, or you can work in archives to do the same job, but basically with paper that are not being used every single day to run the business, so historical paperwork, or you can work in a library, which was really the route I wanted to take because I was like, I love books and I want to be surrounded by books, so I want to work in a library. So during the summer, just before I started my technique, I finished the first draft of a fantasy novel. I wanted to work on this fantasy series, and I still want to work on it. I still love this universe. But I finished the first draft of this during that summer, and it was like a good moment for me, like proving me that I could still finish uh a first draft. But during mostly like the two first years of the program, I did not write that much because school was taking so much time out of me, so much energy out of me, and I was also working part-time while going to school. So if you're still at school and you are having a hard time writing, this is completely normal. Like your brain is doing so many things, it's just normal that you do not find it in yourself to write. So that that was basically the period of time where I did not write so much. Um, but you know, it was still within me. I still knew that this was the thing I wanted to do. Um in the summer of uh 2014, so the summer after my second year of uh technique, this is a three-year program, so it was going into the last year of the program before I graduated. I saw in my writing journal when I went through it that it was the first time that I really stated in the journal that I wanted to make a living as a writer. And there was this whole process of me not wanting to write it down because I was afraid that in the future I would be reading this and saying, Oh my god, you were so naive. Like you would, it was such wishful thinking and you were a dreamer, but you know, it was impossible. So it scared me a lot to state in my writing journal that I really wanted to make a living as a writer. Uh, but that was the first time I wrote it. And during that summer, I really wanted to dedicate myself to writing and to doing this. It's where I had the idea of starting a blog to tell my journey as a writer. So you can see that way back I already wanted to share my writing journey, and at the time, like blogs were um more big, like in 2014, and even then, like they were on the downside, but you know, it was still big. So I wanted to do that, I was thinking about that, and during that summer, I was planning the revision of my Nino Ramo project, which was a zombie novel that I still really love and that I still want to edit. There is something good at that, but I was planning the scenes and I wanted to edit this novel during that summer. I did a lot of work on that. Um, so I did some research about like bacterias and everything. I did a lot of research. I started analyzing stories to really understand how they were working, but resistance again was really making it difficult for me to write. Um, I had this desire to write all the time, but I felt like I was not writing enough. And working on the planning of my second draft of the zombie novel was really hard. I was not liking it a lot, and that's something I did not actually remember. It was something that I wrote in my uh writing journal, and I was surprised by this. And I actually wrote uh a quote at that time, and I wanted to share it with you. Uh, it was the first line I wrote in English in my writing journal, because at the time I was still writing in French, just to put you in perspective. Um, and it was the first sentence I wrote in English in my writing journal. So I think I was starting to get in the groove of writing in English because I think I was at that time consuming um content in English about writing, because in French there wasn't that much content about how to write a good story. So I was starting to read blogs, I think, a lot about how to write a story. Uh so the quote is an awful day of editing is even worse than a bad day of writing. It's like you can't even manage to make something readable out of your shit. It's been a long time since I felt that way. Um, because now I really love editing. Thanks to Sean Coin and Rachel Aaron. They are fully responsible for me loving editing now. Uh so during that summer, um, I also started using Scrivener because you know, in my program we talk a lot the technique, um, we talk a lot about uh metadata and all of those things, and I wanted to use the power of metadata in my writing. And when I saw that you could add basically any metadata to any scenes in your book using Scrivener, I was like hooked and I wanted it. And I actually bought uh a Mac in the the course of the year that followed, just so that I could have like the most up-to-date version of Scrivener, like I really wanted all the power of Scrivener, so I started to do timeline and uh character sheets and those huge spreadsheets into Excel. So even though I hadn't really like fully owned my writing process at that point, I was starting to get into it. Uh, and it's also the year, the summer of uh 2014, the year that I started to write in English. Um so I'm not going to go too much into that. That could be that an entire episode, or maybe a bonus episode at some point, but that's where I started to write in English and to read in English. Um, all my fiction since uh 2014 has been entirely in English, um and all my writing has been too. Um so now we get into the third year of my program, so the last year before I graduated, um, and I'm still not working uh writing that much because of school, but um I still managed to find some time to write basically because in that year I uh decided to take a year off working part-time just to allow myself more space. Um, so I took a loan and thanks to my wonderful partner who backed me up on that, I took a loan and I managed to just not work part-time during that that period of time. So it it gave me a little space to write a little bit more, even though I was not writing that much still because of school. But I'm starting to get really more serious during that year, so from 2014 to 2015. Um, I start working on a short story um that I want to get be published in um a contest, and it's the first short story that I really writed all in English. Um, so I stopped working on the zombie novel because I was really feeling like it was too hard and it didn't work. So I said, okay, I'm going to write a short story in English and see where it takes me. So this story is under a Tulurian Sky, which actually ended up being a novella, a dark science fiction novella that I still love so much and that I to this day haven't managed to sell. But you know, when I get an agent, I will send her or him the story and see if they manage to um to do something with it. Um so I I started just remember this. I started in uh 2015 to work on that. Um, and it was really the moment where I was feeling that I was born to do this and I wanted to do all of the things during that year to get me to become a full-time writer. So even though I had not much time because of school, especially in the last semester of uh the program, I had more time because we had less class, it was more project, and I was doing like I was working on the short story, I was working on my fantasy series, trying to plan the world and everything. I started working on a blog that I wanted to be, you know, the blog I told you about where I share my writing journey, and I also started to work on a fiction blog, a chicklit uh fiction blog that I also want shared on Watpan. So of course I did not do all of those during that time, but it all starts, I started to work on all of those during that that period of time. So from the summer of 2015 where I got where I graduated uh to 2016, I'm still working a lot. So I'm working more. Um, I'm really dedicated, but it's still variable and resistant, it's still basically there a lot. Um, so I'm I found a job in my field, but it was just a contract at first. But at least, you know, I was working in a field that I enjoy, and I started working for the archives of the city of Quebec, and it was really a job that I really enjoyed, um, and that fueled me a lot at that period of time. Um, so during the summer of 2015, I was working on my blogs. Uh, I was working on my science fiction short story, and what I wrote, looking at like at that period of time, I was really tracking my writing, and what I wrote was that my goals were not realistic at all. I always believed I could do so much more that I actually could do, and that really got to me, the fact that I never seemed to be able to do the things I wanted to do. Uh, so for the rest of 2015, I was working on the first draft of the second book of my fantasy series. So I was like, okay, I'm going to write the second book so that I can then better edit the first book. But I'm still working on the two blogs, and I'm still working on the short story. I'm still working on like all of the things at the same time. Plus, I'm uh writing short stories, and I started to submit them to magazine and contest in the hope of getting a publication. So I'm really following like uh Stephen King's on writing, like the path that he was talking about, and that he did with like, okay, I'm going to write short stories, submit them, get them published, and you know, get this thing going. So that's about the route that I was going for in 2015. Because of that, at the end of 2015, I ended up with my first acceptance letter and my first and still to this day only publication. Uh so I submitted this really flash fiction piece to uh contest in Canada, and I ended up out of like I think it was 300 submission being like in the top 15, so I got an honorable mention for this, and it felt so good. And that little spike of validation and seeing my name, there was actually a printed copy that I got for free. That was my only payment for this, but anyway, it was amazing, and I saw my name and my story, my writing in paper, and you know it was so amazing and such a good feeling. Then um in 2016, so I'm still working on the blogs, and uh I launched the Chiclet fiction blog at some point, but I stopped working on the blog about sharing my writing journey. I don't remember really how or when it happened, but I I launched a fiction blog at some point, I cannot even remember, but I know that I completely stopped in April 2016. So I was trying to publish like a story every week, and I really liked getting feedback, I like uh talking with readers, but it didn't feel right. And you know, I want to do again an episode about this, about being aligned with the writer that you're supposed to be and publishing in a way that aligns with you and all of this, and basically, this project it was a fun project, it was, I think, a good project, and I had lots of good uh feedback on it, but it was just not aligned with the writer that I am and that I'm supposed to be, so I got burnt out by it, and I just had to stop all of it. And I got also actually uh quite some bit of attention on Wattpad, like not big things, but I was selected to be um featured on the love page, I guess, I think in Wattpad. Um, but I got I got some good numbers on this, and the people who started to read my fiction blog on Wattpad really went through it all, and I had lots of of like and everything. So I think there was really something good there, but it's just not connecting with the writer that I really wanted to be. Uh so during that summer of 2016, we were we moved, uh I was in our for in our first house. Um, I was working again on my science fiction short story, not a lot. Um or a lot, I don't remember. I wasn't tracking it, so I don't really remember. I was working on another story on Wetpad because I really enjoyed like the interaction with the readers and feeling like I was not writing into a void and getting nothing out of it. Um, I was also working on a lot of short stories at that time. I was working on the second book of my fantasy series again, and even though I was still writing a lot, there was still a lot of resistance to all of it. And in my writing journal, I was talking about, you know, when the writing was going badly, and yeah, it I was all over the place. Looking back, I think that maybe that was the problem being so all over the place and chasing that publication so much. So we're now in 2017, and it's the year that I finally got consistent about my writing. So I started um writing for about 10 to 15 hours a month uh during that time. There was some months where it was more difficult, but I could see in my tracking, in my journals, that I was really going somewhere. Like I could feel the momentum of there was less periods of time where I wasn't writing at all compared to before. So at that time I was working on the second book again of my fantasy series from January to June. Um, and see, it's not clear now. I'm trying to see exactly when I finished it, but you know, oh no, I I stopped working on it in June. Yeah, that's it. And but the book was not finished. I wrote still again a lot of short stories, submitted them to magazine. I was still working on my science fiction short story. Um, so it's been like a long time, but it's at that point that I discovered in August 2017, I discovered Story Grid. And really, that's if not Oraimo is an important moment of my writing career so far. Discovering Story Grid is another so much important part. That's where I really finally found a way that worked with my brain to understand exactly why my stories were not working and how I could make them work. And it really changed anything, but of course, like anything, there was this big learning curve, and applying the story grid to my short story uh took a lot of time and a lot of energy. So I remember that at that point, even though I was happy of having discovered the story grid and feeling more in control of my writing, I was also really disappointed that all that time as had gone by since I finished my certificate in creative writing, so basically six years at that point, and that I still wasn't farther ahead in my writing career. I wrote a lot about that in my writing journal. Uh so in September I did something that was a really good decision, and I bought the War of Art, Turning Pro and Do the Work from Stephen Prosville. And really, those books helped me put a name on the bad feelings I was having, and it really helped me change my mindset and change my approach to my writing. So if you're feeling if you haven't read those books and you're feeling like shit in your writing life, seriously go buy them and read them. Uh, and I think even at that same period of time, I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilberg. And I'm I might be confusing the date uh at that point. I didn't check exactly when uh Big Magic came out, but anyway, like it's the same sort of impact that it had on me. Uh so because of this, and I wrote that in my journal, I turned pro in November. And turning pro is the internal change of turning pro. Pro as described by Stephen Pressville. And I can see from now on that it really made a difference. So I finished that year happier than I had been in my writing life then for so long before it. So in 2018, I'm learning a lot and I'm feeling really good. I'm really seeing this in my writing journal, and I'm writing less in the journal, which is always a good sign. Now because I have turned pro, I'm really focused on finishing my science fiction short story, which is now um. I I think at that point it had started to get into a novella. I keep cementing my short stories, I keep on piling up projection. The rejection puts doubt in my mind, but I still like fighting the resistance now that I know what it is. I work in that period of time about 10 to 13 hours a month, but what I forgot to tell you is that in December 2017 I learned that I'm pregnant, which was something we really wanted to get. We really wanted to be parents, so I get pregnant in December. So for the beginning of the 2018, it it's not affecting my writing much, even if my first trimester was hard. It's really more in the third trimester, so from June to September, and I'm not writing basically anything because like the pregnancy was was hard uh on my body, I was sick at the time, so so yeah, it was uh it was hard, and you know, writing uh took the second place, and then um I gave birth to my baby in uh July. So, of course, like from July to like September I was not writing that much, like all the attention and the focus was on the beautiful baby girl that was now in our life. But from September to December 2018, I was on a maternity leave. Now I live in Quebec, and here we have the so incredibly beautiful privilege of having uh paid maternity leave for every woman in Quebec uh who is working like a job who is not working for themselves. We have a full year paid maternity leave. Uh so yeah, I'm so I'm so grateful that I have this and that we have that in that province and in the country of Canada. Like, I don't know, I think it should be the same for everywhere, but let's not get into that. So from September to December 2018, I'm working a lot more, so now I'm working about 16 hours a month, which was at that point a lot for me. I started doing my writer Instagram account to again share my writing journey. You see, I always wanted to share my writing journey, and I'm really loving it. I'm connecting with other writers through the Instagram account, I'm meeting some incredible people because of it, and um, I'm working and I'm really focused on my science fiction short story, I'm applying the story grid to it, having like a great time, even if it's not always like perfect for the baby, but you know, I'm managing. Um, so from January to March 2019, um it's getting easier with the baby because the baby gets older. So I and I'm recovering from the pregnancy and the birth and everything. So at that time I'm writing something like 30 to 40 hours a month. So, you know, I'm tripling and quadrupling the time that I was able to put before. I finish finally my um novella and I submit it to the writers of the future contest in the 31st of March, so the very last day that I had to submit it uh for that round. Like it's a year-round contest, but it was like the last round. Uh, so I'm super pumped and I'm like, okay, because before the short stories I was working on and submitting to contest and magazine, they were all literary work, and I'm like I said before, I'm not a literary writer, so I was getting nothing but rejection. But I at that time was like, okay, I think when I'm writing speculative fiction, which was more aligned with me, dark speculative fiction, I was like, okay, I'm going to get published, it's going to be easy, it's going to work well. So I was really feeling that I was going to get something out of the Writers of the Future contest. And they have all of those um things that you can win. So there are the prizes, but they're also finalist and semi-finalist and honorable mention and gold, I think, something like that. So I was like, okay, it's sure that I'm at least winning some honorable mention, like with all the work I've put in, with all the story grid stuff that I learned. I even hired Jay Torn, which I talked about in the introduction. And um, he's a writer, he's a podcaster, but he's also a story grid certified editor. So at the time I hired him to look at my short story to have a feedback. So I was like, okay, I did all the work and it's going to work. So when I'm waiting for the writers of the future contest um to come back to me from April to July, I'm working on my fantasy series, and it starts really strong, and I want to plan this whole seven-book fantasy series. And I I'm feeling it. And I still love the story in this world, and I'm going to write this series one day. But I start strong and it goes down and down and down each month because it's just too big, you know, working on this vast of a project when you're just starting out, like Jigger Rowling is an outlier, being able to complete such an amazing series, like on our first try, it was too much for me. And in July, my science fiction novella gets plainly rejected by the writers of the future contest. But when I say plainly rejected, it's plainly like I have nothing, like it's the formal rejection letter. And I was completely devastated by this, and it's not an overstatement. Like I called, I was alone. I don't know. I think my partner was away for the weekend when I got the news, and I called my parents at like 10 because I read the email in my bed, and I was weeping like so much. I was I was completely broken by this. Um, so somehow, and also at that time, my maternity was coming to an end. I was starting to work in a new job in um another library, and my maternity leave was ended, and I really believed again that during that maternity leave I would be able to somehow finish a novel and somehow get a book deal and somehow not go back to work because I would be a full-time writer. And that was not happening. My maternity leave was ending, and my novella had been rejected, and I felt like a complete failure. And at that time, I had hired Kastania Enski to be my writing coach, my writing mentor, and she was working on me to help me uh plan my um fantasy series. And at some point when I was really good getting down by all of this, she gave me the best advice and the advice that I really needed so much to hear at that time, and it was because at that time I was like, I think I'm never going to completely finish a novel and be able to try to get agent with it and try to get a book deal. So my career is never going to start, and I feel stuck at this place, and I'm never going to get out of it. And she gave me the advice I'd most needed at that time ever, and she said, just go write a standalone. Just go write something fun, something easy, something simple that you know without an inch of a doubt that you are capable of finishing. Don't even put on yourself the pressure of publishing it. Just go and write it just for fun, just so that you can prove to yourself that you are capable of finishing a novel completely. And that was the advice I needed the most. So that's where we are right now. I've been uh following Kesania's advice. I started working on uh horror novel, uh like my first novel was um a story about a mother and her baby, which was the reality I'd just been living. It was an idea that came to me during the nights where I was feeding my baby, and I had this image of opening the door of my daughter's nursery and just seeing a shape, a dark shape holding her, and and I was afraid of that. So I used that fear that I had and I wrote a novel about it. I started working on this in September 2019, and I'm still working on it, but it has been a really great time. Uh I felt more in control, and I had the most fun I've never had working on this project. Uh, I'm now doing the last round of editing on this novel, which is amazing. It's the line editing part. Um, I've sent the novel to my writer's friend, to a mentor from the Horror Writers Association who's working with me on it, and I know now that I will finish this novel. So Kesania's advice really worked, like it was what I needed to do to get unstuck and to really start going into my writing career more firmly. So during that time, like lots happened. I had another baby, my dear boy. Uh, I got really, really sick. Uh uh, we built another house. Uh, so lots happened during that time, but the project stayed there and I kept being focused on it, and I kept on learning, and I kept on applying everything that I was learning. So it's been really great, and I feel now more in control that I've never felt, and it feels just so good. And during that time, also, there was one other project that I worked on. Uh, in between the second draft and the third draft of the novel, I worked on a short story, uh horror short story. I stayed within my true love drawer, and uh I worked it all. I edited it with the help of my writer friend, my writing group, and we because during that time I also got part of a writing group, which is they are so amazing, uh, and so they helped me edit the story, and I submitted it to the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, and I'm still waiting on the answer from them, which is kind of cool because normally like most of their rejection letters are out at this point, like most of the rejection letters will come in the first 20 days of the submission, and it's been like 98 days, not that I'm counting, so it's looking good, like at least like there has been more than one pass on it, which feels good. Um, so if it doesn't find a place in this magazine, I know that I will find another magazine uh that will want to publish it. Like I know it. So that's where I am right now. That's where you're going to be following me in the upcoming week. Um, so yeah, I hope you enjoyed looking back on my writing journey. So now you know like a lot about what happened. I'll be adding links to everything I've mentioned in this episode. So all of the books, all of the resources, all of the person, I will put a link in the show notes. So if uh there is something that interests you that you think could help you, uh just go there, you'll find the link. Also, if you enjoyed this episode, uh please subscribe to the podcast so that you can get uh the future episode when they will be coming up, and also you can tell your writer friends about the podcast if you think they could enjoy it too. So thank you so much for listening today and have a lovely week of writing.

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