If it feels right... I do it. (And vice versa.)

Popping into the Wayback Machine for a minute...

When I was in high school, we received a little freebie magazine every so often. I can't remember the title of it, or what most of the content was, but I do remember there being an article called "How to Write for Television." Should you desire to do that, it said, after you'd written your very best effort at a teleplay, you should scan the credits of your favorite TV show and look for someone whose job title had something to do with "script" or "story" - then send them your script.

I chuckle now at the image of all those unsuspecting script supervisors and story editors receiving big manila envelopes from students around the country. The magazine article included a single page of a sample script, reformatted to be pretty on the page. Not a good example, but it worked for me, and giving this a try felt right. I wrote a script for The Partridge Family (my favorite show), packed it up, and mailed it off to a stranger named Dale McRaven.

Surely, I thought -- since I've been known to elevate cluelessness to a fine art -- I'd hear back from this person right away.

I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Eventually, I gave up.

Then, several months later, I got a phone call. From Hollywood. From Dale McRaven.


I've certainly tried to do that. What I've also done is try things that felt right, when they felt right. Some of those moves had a lot to do with my enduring cluelessness, but others have been well-considered, well-thought-out. I listen to a lot of the "You need to..." advice and weigh it against what feels right. What seems to point in the direction I want to go, at the time I want to go there. I've had a couple of doors open for me just wide enough for me to step through... but I didn't. I didn't want to go on writing tie-in novels. Didn't want to do the colossal amount of networking and butt-kissing and surrendering to the whims of other people that would have been necessary for me to work in television. Instead, I wrote fanfic. WROTE MY FACE OFF. Published a truckload of stories, fine-tuned my craft, and got acquainted with a lot of very nice people.

Now it's time to explore something new, because it feels right. I can write on my own schedule, following any path that looks interesting. I'm not dependent on other people's whims. It's not up to anyone else to say "Yes, you can publish this," or "Go away, kid." I'm my own boss.

I'm reading blogs and articles that say, "To attract the attention of mainstream publishers, you need to..." That's great advice for someone else. But for me? Where I am right now, sitting in my favorite chair with my laptop in my lap, writing what tickles me and publishing it when I can say, "Okay, we're good to go"... that's exactly where I want to be.

Now, we'll see what happens next.