Here's To Magical Beginnings

Like many others, I tend to take time in early January to reflect on the past year and contemplate goals for the New Year.


From a writing standpoint, 2008 was a good year. I hit several writing milestones in completion of projects and publications. You don’t understand. This is a REALLY big step for me. I never have problems meeting deadlines in the workplace or in my personal life where others are counting on me. Yet, somehow, I have a lot of difficulty completing…anything, deadline or not, when it is solely for me. And writing, until recently, has been just that – strictly for me. I enjoy writing. When writing for your own pleasure, you write what you want to write. When writing for business, you do not always get this luxury. I am blessed. I have had the incredible good luck to have writing projects that I have enjoyed immensely, had them published and been paid for it – the trifecta of writing.


Writing is often a very personal thing. It reflects your work, your time and talent. It is not always easy to share what you have written with others. Face it, it’s a critical world out there, and to have someone else read your work and pass judgment on it is not an easy thing to handle. Often as writers we baby step it, first showing a piece we’ve written to our closest circle of friends and family – those people in our lives who know our short comings and stick around anyway. The problem with this is we sometimes get feedback that is slanted towards what we want and need to hear (thank you kind hearted friends and family) but not necessarily what we may hear from someone who is not concerned with sparing our feelings. When we make that giant leap of faith to show our work to professionals in the industry it can be a very big and scary step. I’ve been baby stepping this leap of faith offering certain projects for critique to my writing group, reworking areas and polishing it and sending the piece out into the big world of publishing. So far, I have been fortunate – haven’t found homes for everything of course, but have gotten off to a pretty good start.


To those of you who know me, you know the Destineers stuff is my baby. For anyone who may not know about the Destineers, here are some links. The website link is http://Destineers.com and the forum link is http://Cybrarie.com Please feel free to join in the fun. We love new friends! These are my playgrounds and you are most certainly invited to come join in and play there with me, Ryan (the leader of the group), his brother Brady (who is fanatical about dragons…especially since he found a dragon egg in the Netherscape), Sean (the self proclaimed comic relief of the group) and Kylie (the writer of the group who keeps the journal of all they have learned and their adventures).


In a few weeks we are releasing the Destineers Journal of Fantasy Nations. This is the Journal as recorded by Kylie, her “field guide” of the various fantasy beings they have learned about in class. It’s filled with tidbits she has learned in class [from Professor Noah Washington who is, by the way, a goblin] about the various Nations of Fantasy as well as her own observations from meeting these folks. It’s sort of a prequel to the novel – a sample of the types of characters from the quests. We hope you will join the fantasy and the fun.


Please take a moment to stop by the website (at http://Destineers.com) and the forum (at http://Cybrarie.com) and join in the fun.


Thanks, and have a magical week!