In 2023, I took a two-month online course to write a 50,000 word romance novel. The course itself was hugely impactful – the book I ended up writing was not. Which was fine, because the goal I set out for myself was to simply sit down and write every day. The course helped because of its persistent message that all we were supposed to do was “write a shitty first draft.”

Not, like, write a first draft and if it’s terrible, that’s okay. Write something terrible! Just get it on paper. If one scene doesn’t make sense with the one before, who cares, keep writing! We were not to delete anything, and if we truly couldn’t stand something, they said to just change the font color to white so that we literally couldn’t see it anymore.

Since then, I’ve been extremely slowly mulling over a book idea that I’m much more excited about. After a year of putting together world-building ideas and plotting out some of the story, I’ve actually started to write. Which leads to my next big lesson: sharing what I write.

Not here!

Haha, psych!? This is not going to turn into a “read my book!” blog. But I knew that I would let time pass and get distracted if I didn’t have some accountability. So I asked some friends to be my Hype Team and sent them a link to my Google doc today.

A 37-year-old woman asking her friends to read her novel-in-progress does not seem like earthshaking news, but for me it is! I have always loved to write, and one of my lifelong dreams is to write a book and attempt to get it published. My original major at university was English, but I could not stomach the thought of my work being critiqued publicly, so I switched to Sociology. Which, thank goodness, so much of my life is based on that. But the point is that I switched my entire educational plan because I feared my creativity being judged by my peers.

And now I have actively invited them to do so. At this stage in my life, I am no longer having the weekly “look at me doing something new and leveling up!” moments that characterized my teens and twenties. But this is a moment where I can actively see how much I’ve grown in my self-worth, in my trust in friends, and in my communication (because let’s be real, I specifically asked people to be so so so nice to me).

Yay me! This almost-middle-aged-dog is learning new tricks.