Curses and Dragons

I’m young for a writer. I’m not the youngest by far, but even at the ripe age of 36, I’m Sincerely Not Antiquated to be starting out in this field. At 36 in many other kinds of professions, you might be getting a title with Senior in it already (I have that at my dayjob, for example). Friends from my college cohort with PhDs have already gotten tenure. My lawyer friends from the same cohort have been building their practices for years by now. And yet, here I am: new writer, and a young one, at that.

Perhaps that is because writing has a very high appearance threshold. It takes a LOT to look like you are progressing in your career. You can be finely honing your craft or selling dozens of short stories, but folks who aren’t also writers in your same genre aren’t going to have any sense of how accomplished you are when all you have to show are pages of rejection letters and really nice compliments from your critique circle. Anything less than a book contract or a major short fiction award, and you’re just dabbling in a hobby as far as anyone else is concerned.

And if you commit to writing at the age I am now? You probably won’t become visible to other people for at least five years, if you are both lucky and prolific.

So, even though I first got a short story published in 2004, that’s why I’m still a “new writer.” Heck, I know writers who published their first novels in the last decades and have produced several books, who are still considered “new writers.”

Which is all terribly bogus, because I’ve been honing my craft since I was eleven years old. That was when I consciously started trying to improve at writing, and I think it counts–that moment of commitment, to me, is when you become a writer. So, I don’t feel particularly new, in that regard. The culture of publishing? New. But writing? Not new.

And yet–and yet! I have often felt like I wasted so much precious time when I was younger, not writing. I often berate myself for practice time lost, when instead, I was out doing other things. Especially in college! When writing thinned to a trickle!

But then I read things like this:

We all know that time seems to speed up as we grow older – but according to studies at the University of Cincinnati in the 1970′s, this effect is so pronounced that if you’re 20 today, you’re already halfway through life, in terms of your subjective experience of how time passes, even if you live until you’re 80. And if you’re 40 – again, assuming you live to be 80 – your life is 71% per cent over. Basically, if you’re older than about 30, you’re almost dead.

From: Barking up the wrong tree

Egads.

So. As someone whose life is, subjectively speaking, 2/3rds over, I guess I’m glad I spent as much time as I could being young and experiencing things, because from here on out, I guess I’ll barely have time to synthesize everything that came before this.

(Tongue only partially in cheek.)