Signs

About 2 weeks ago, not long after I emailed my friend Anna about my new writing resolutions, a very curious thing happened. I voluntarily copyedit Anna's blog - because I'm anal, and because I love her enough to want to slay her typos ninja-style (and yes, I fancy myself a grammar ninja - far better than a grammar nazi, which I am on my crankier days), on a blog that is part of her professional life as a freelancer. I copyedit for her because I love it, and would never ask for anything in return, yet she insists on sending me something every year as a thank you. Often it's a novel, but perhaps she's caught on to the fact that, despite her picking out really interesting-sounding books, I really don't have much time to read stuff I've never heard of, when school and three book clubs and my own, ever-growing book list are clamoring for my limited attention. (The one exception was two years ago, right after Helen died and completely unaware of that fact, she sent me Let's Take the Long Way Home, which I devoured in one very sad, but ultimately cathartic, evening.) So this year, I had just sent Anna a whole email about my New Year's resolutions to write more and asking her advice as a friend who makes a living from writing. She wrote back a lengthy, thoughtful response, and concluded with an offer to treat me to, instead of a book, a subscription to Poets & Writers magazine this year. Wonderful! I responded. So it was settled.

Less than a week later, I received a little love note in the mail from Poets & Writers, offering me 75% off a one-year subscription. To my knowledge, I have never corresponded with this magazine before, so I found it very curious that, just at the time we had been talking about them, they sent me something asking me to subscribe. I asked Anna (among asking her if she wanted me to take advantage of this fantastic offer, which she declined) if she had anything to do with it. Our best guess is that they now have my information from her buying the subscription and mixed it up in their mailing department by mistake. If that wasn't the explanation... then it's just serendipitous!

Today at the library I came across another magazine I have occasionally perused, called Writer's Digest. It happened to be last February's issue, whose cover story is titled "How to Submit Anything (& Everything!): Your step-by-step guide to getting published: novels, short stories, freelance articles, nonfiction, memoirs, scripts, poems, picture books & more!" This magazine is not normally so targeted to my needs and interests, especially when I had just been wondering about how I was going to figure all this out on my own and have written things that fall into more than half of these categories. I take this to be another sign.

The third sign was reading an article from a friend's Facebook post entitled "6 Harsh Truths that Will Make You a Better Person," in which the author makes an example of, among other aspirations, writers who don't write. Wong says:

"Being in the business I'm in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they're missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things.

"But really, does that matter? Is 'writing things' all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a 'writer'?

"For the love of God, yes."

My new mantra. Thanks, Universe!