June was a month of catharsis for me, that bled through July. I let go of a piece of writing I wrote years ago. It was a piece aimed at getting a conversation going with my parents. My mother took the horrible things written about me and instead of contradicting what I wrote, she added more. I let her view of me shape how I saw myself for years. It was recently pointed out that I was looking at the piece the wrong way. I needed to look at what this piece of writing said about me as a writer not at what it said about me as a person. You see, I wrote this piece as a character retrospective of my mother’s view of me, not how I view myself. At eighteen, I pegged my mother’s view of me so well that the view was not refuted once revealed. I could not see how well I wrote from another person’s perspective. I only adopted that perspective as my own and fought against it every chance I had.
I’m sitting here now, in September, seeing my writing life in a whole new light. I am looking back at all the pieces of my work that were published verbatim by publishers. I am seeing that I am a better writer than I ever give myself credit for. I am no longer looking at what the words said but how they were written and…
I AM SELLING BOOKS!