Today please welcome Jackie Cross, who writes over at With Just a Bit of Magic. You can find just about anything there from recipes to pictures and fiction. She is a wife, mom to four kids, and during the day she spends her time working as a product owner for a software development company and heading up social media at her husband’s business. In the meantime, she dreams of new career in social media and freelance writing. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.
Writing
2. The activity or occupation of composing text for publication: “she made a decent living from writing.”
I aspire to be one of the latter, but I know I have a lot of work ahead of me to get there.
As a child I had a never ending imagination and invented stories complete with pictures. I played creative games with my sister and friends, and even my dreams were full of life. They were so vivid I could see, feel, hear, and smell everything in them! At one point I was sure that there was a snake in my bed and couldn’t move at all… I was terrified it was going to bite me. Once it slithered away I flew out of bed, woke my dad, and had him check my entire bed to make sure nothing was there.
As I got older my imagination began to fade and I wrote less with each passing year. What I did do though was read, read, and read some more. I’ve always loved reading and it’s helped spark my desire to write. It’s kept that little voice in the back of my head urging me to do something… to write.
Finally, the spark grew into a flame. The voice got louder and I was struck with inspiration. I started a blog and began reading Write on Edge, formerly The Red Dress Club. It was there that I found the weekly writing prompts and began writing short bits of fiction each Friday. Eventually I signed up for NaNoWriMo and pushed myself to write every single day.
NaNoWriMo was a challenge. I’d never written so much before and I have yet to share what I wrote because it is the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever written. I cringe thinking about all the work involved in producing something presentable. But that’s okay because I know that the more I write the better it will get.
I continue to write and look for opportunities to learn and grow as a writer. I’m branching out and looking for freelance opportunities and putting myself out there. I know that it will help me grow as a person and as a writer. Besides…. practice makes perfect, right?
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