Day 28: Describe a moment when you made a big, bold move. In any area of life: Career, Love, etc.

Happiness is a form of courage...I've made a lot of bold moves in my life thus far and I'm only 22. I've made two bold moves when it came to love but I'd rather not share those. Instead, I'd like to talk about the first bold move I have recollection of making: the moment I wrote my first novel and sent it out for publication.

Anyone can write a book. Seriously. There are a lot of people who write. Just look at all the books that get published and multiple that number per genre by about 500. That's about how many manuscripts I'm going to assume publishing companies receive per week (maybe even per day). And most of them are unedited messes of words used in the wrong way.  Yet, there are even some that get published that I don't understand the appeal at all of the story. For me, that's the Harry Potter series. For others, I'm guessing it's something like Twilight, The Hunger Games triology, and maybe even the Fifty Shades Triology.

So, I think you get the idea that anyone really can write a book. Some people just have too much to say, in my opinion, and it doesn't work in their favor. In my case, I'm a soft-spoken girl with a lot of insight and knowledge into a lot of things (I read a lot) so I feel I have a unique view that gives my writing a unique voice. Plus, not only is my book smarts reason for writing, I also have a lot of really weird life experiences for someone so young. Basically, though, writing is how I get people to pay attention to me.

Yet, it takes a fearless guy or girl (especially one at the age of fifteen) to take the finished product and send it out to be published. Being that I was so young, I figured most bigger publishing houses (Random House, Penguin, Scholastic, etc) would not even accept a query letter from a teenage girl from Florida. Even more so, I didn't have enough experience at the time to know how to write a decent query letter and maybe entice a few agents to fight over my book. So, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I googled book publishers and found that there was a new avenue in book publishing called self-publishing where basically your book gets published but you have to pay the company to do all the work and you don't have a marketing team behind you. You are the author and your own marketing team.

I found Outskirts Press to be reasonable and sent them my manuscript and they loved it. Yes, even self-publishers can reject books. Thankfully, they loved it enough to publish it and in September of 2006, Dream Girl was born. Looking at the book and being that it's been 7 years since publication, I see where I've made mistakes and I'm not as proud as I originally was with the two books. After One Last Breath is released, I'm going to go back to working on Angelic Charm which will be my original Dream Girl triliogy but the first two books will be edited and the whole novel will be 40,000 words or more so I can market it to both agents and bigger publishing houses. My seven years experience has taught me that a book has be the best even before it leaves my hands as a fetus or in industry terms, my manuscript.

Yet, even though, my novels aren't the best representation of my writing career, they are exhibits of how far I've come as a writer and also the start of it all. They also exhibit my youthful fearlessness as a young fifteen year old, and for that, I am proud of them and don't regret them in any way. Most of all, they prove that I can look rejection in the face, no matter which face it wears, and not let it shake me. Now, that's the definition of bold.

Love Times Infinity,

Chelsea

xoxo

God Bless!

~Just Keep Swimming~