Welcome to the blog of a shameless cliché.
Well. Here we are, checking off all the boxes typical of a writer who’s hit and passed their 30th birthday without having yet become a runaway success in their field, or even just published and at least occasionally appreciated (by someone other than their mother or writer’s group):
- Nearly crippling self-doubt that you could write anything that anyone even wants to read (without, of course, having yet had the guts to put much of anything out there to find out one way or the other)? Yep.
- A day job you feel pretty good about, and you’re trying to figure out if it’s fulfilling enough to take the sting out of not yet doing much with what you know and have been telling yourself and everyone else is your actual dream? Absolutely.
- A steady diet of daydreams about your life as it would be if you could live off of doing what you truly loved doing… while being pretty sure that at the rate you’re going, your tombstone will one day say “Imagine what could’ve been”, and you’ll be buried with your bodyweight in unfinished, or finished but unread manuscripts? You betcha.
But here we are in the year 2021, after a year of hell and uncertainty, and now this little writer here — one of, I’m sure, millions of others stuck in the same creative limbo — has decided that her tombstone will someday at minimum read “At least she tried”.
Now, I come armed with a pen name to keep from holding myself back over dumb worries about what people who know me will have to say about whatever I put out there, and a new website to match. I’m also freshly equipped with the certainty that I need to get off my writerly butt and get this thing really going before my first kid, my son, is born this coming June. With all of that, I’m here to throw my hat and my voice into the already wildly overcrowded book space, for anyone who feels like listening.
I want to see what comes of the mountain of story ideas and started and half-finished novels I’ve got sitting in my computer and in my wild stacks of notebooks and looseleaf paper. I want to stop just daydreaming about what I could actually be trying to do. I want my son to be proud of me someday, and not just see me as the dork who feeds him and makes him indulge her with watching old Stargate seasons and Disney movies with her.
I especially want to be proud of myself, and to know that whatever comes of it, I actually put all of my heart, my sometimes foolish optimism, and my weird but colourful brain into this thing. No half measures. No stalling because of the endless stream of available self-doubts and excuses. I know, I know — I’m sounding like every aspiring writers New Year’s resolution right now. Whatever. You chose to read this.
Yep, I really am a giant living cliché, just like all the other special writer snowflakes out here, trying to carve out their own little trails in the world of books and other writing forms. But it is what it is. I am what I am. Let’s see if this cliché can make her cliché (but still awesome) little dreams come true.
Celine Aubert 