When I was ten years old I was removed from my childhood home and placed in the care of my aunt and uncle. After sometime and a lot of begging I was allowed visitation with my father. Our first meeting, after nearly a year apart, was at a dingy fast-food restaurant with a social worker one table away. After a few minutes of idle chat the social worker went up front to get another cup of coffee and my father leaned in close and said, barely above a whisper, "Are you ok?"
I leaned in also and whispered back, "Yeah, I am all right."
He nodded and leaned back in his chair. "You are never afraid." he said matter-of-factly "Even when you were little and to pass swimming you had to jump off the high-dive. All the other kids were all upset, but not you. You just walked up the ladder, strolled to the end of the board, plunged your nose and jumped."
What I didn't tell my dad at the time was that I was really terrified, but he was sitting in the audience so I didn't want to let him down.
I retold this story to explain that I decided to overcome my fear of being published. First, I selected a short story I wrote for my dad right after his death. Next I went to the IRS website and got a free EIN (Employee Identification Number) in the name Sally A Wolf. Next I signed up for a standard Amazon account. Then I went to the kindle publishing section, uploaded my work, added a snazzy pic, and Tada! easy as that I am a published author. The best part is that I did it all for free, plus my husband is not upset with me for it, he has even offered to make my covers for me.
The most fun thing I did was as soon as my story was live, I search for myself on goodreads.com/ librarything.com and there I was! So I asked to be upgraded to an author account. Even if I never sell one copy at least I did what I set out to do.
See it live here The Chase By Sally a Wolf
So what is my next step? Well that would be getting a drivers license.
Plug your nose and jump Sally. ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm so proud of you, Sally! I am working on overcoming my fears to do with writing and getting published myself. I have been participating in a writing challenge called ROW80 since around the first of the year. I have been taking a break for the past two weeks because we lost our house and had to get all our stuff out. We're now living in a two bedroom apartment in Donelson, but life goes one. At least I still have my family, my health, and my books! How about you? Did you ever get moved to your new house? How is the anniversary of the flood affecting you? I've had you in my thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI am going to check out your book as soon as I can. I'm also going to follow you on this blog and your new book review blog (yay, you're on blogger now!). If you would like to follow my writing blog and learn more about the ROW80 challenge, here's my blog link: http://thestoryinsideme.blogspot.com/
Hope to hear from you soon! And congrats again on your book. =O)
Thank you for the nice words and the fallow :) I am sorry to hear about your house. Yes we got a new house though not completely settled. You move closer to where I was and I move farther away lol. We are like ships that pass in the night.
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