No, I am not robbing banks across Texas or singing cabaret in a Berlin nightclub.
My double life is that I am a mild-mannered career coach by day and a writer at night. By the light of the moon, I pull out my laptop and play with my fictional friends in my invisible sandbox.
I didn’t show my drafts to anyone. Even when asked, I murmur that “it’s like Outlander with vampires” and then frantically change the subject. I kept saying that I am an aspiring writer, a hobbyist, or that its just a little story… I have written over 330,000+ words in the last year. That little story had gotten out of hand!
This isn’t just a confession of my double life. It’s a confession that I have been a hypocrite.
I tell my clients so often to proclaim themselves what they are that I might as well have a shirt that says ‘name and claim.’ If I have a client call themselves a junior, I virtually shake them through the computer. Stop dismissing yourself, I say, your work is better than that!
Eeep, cue the hypocrisy. The doctor hasn’t been taking her own medicine.
I have 100% faith in myself as a career coach because I have helped thousands of people change careers, find jobs, and design more aligned work lives. In my nonprofit work, I have triaged cases that other career coaches turn away from. My clients have run the gauntlet from homeless people to business development executives. It makes it easy for me to bang that “I am a fab career coach” drum.
Fiction writing, however… I turn into a squirrelly fresher who can’t make eye contact. I received a scholarship to a writing residency in September 2019 and I was terrified! It took a lot to sit with writers and not run out yelling that there was a terrible mistake.
Every morning, I journal and I have been writing affirmations about how I am a writer. I force myself to not put a modifier like unpublished or aspiring or amateur. The first time that I wrote that simple affirmation- ‘I am a writer’- it was so hard!
I used to be a very confident writer until my first year in a creative writing program at university. Cliched as this sounds, I let a professor’s criticism over my preferred subject matter (sci-fi/fantasy) and my work scare me out of the program and then I didn’t write fiction again for nearly 10 years. Its been a long road to regain this budding faith and it will be longer still before I will be as confident as I was as a young lass. However, confidence and faith are like any other muscle. You can strengthen them!
I am stepping out of my comfort zone, I freaking rocketed out of my comfort zone by sending you this novelette Down & Out Witch and now, I’m sending myself into the atmosphere by publishing A Witch Called Red.
So thank you for your interest in my writing. It means more than you can ever know.
Cheers, Sami
Reads to Sink Your Fangs Into
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