Are There Enough Words to Go Around?

You may or may not have known, books have long been a love of mine. All thanks to my mom who had me at the library as an itty bitty, reading has just become part of who I am.  The writing piece came along slower, but by the time I was a junior in college, I was also equally in love with writing. My grades told me I wasn’t half bad, unless you ask me to write something fiction and then it was baaaaaad. But because of my love of non-fiction, I quickly gravitated towards reading authors who were writing about life stories or books filled with narrative essays. It still my favorite genre to read. *The Moth has long been a favorite podcast because as far spread across the spectrum as the topic can be, the whole podcast is about telling crafted stories.

It didn’t take long to put these pieces that excited me together, and come to the conclusion that I have this desire to gather all my words, my stories and get them into a book. Author. If you were to ask me my dream job, that would 100% be it, even though it’s slightly terrifying putting that out there. Blogging also gets my heart because I get to string words together that *hopefully* inspire, share, connect, bring laughter, maybe even, occasionally, get you to shed a tear.

But as I am S L O W L Y writing this book, it’s hard to not see that girl on Instagram post a picture with her new literary agent and feel insanely discouraged. Or, that morning when I actually read a super similar book idea typed out on someone else’s blog, and that person is actually getting to publish their book. That’s a real encouraging morning.

Are there enough words to go around?

Maybe noticing others is the little kick in my ass that’s needed to get me to actually finish my book proposal. Maybe I shouldn’t feel so threatened because it’s not like there is anything new under the sun, especially in terms of books. I mean, lets face it. People tell stories all the time. Some are great; others not so much. Still, they’re told. Two sweet encouragers of my dreams told me that there is room for me too. There are enough words in the world for both my stories and the stories of the person ahead of me in this journey.

I almost believe them…