I’ve had some strange experiences recently.

I’m not sure if I mentioned this one, but I went to lunch with some old friends and a kid recognized me and wanted a selfie.

Then went to a wedding and a teacher who works with disabled kids, told me how she’d been at a school where the class was writing me letters, asking me to come visit, and when she told the kids she knew me, she instantly became a celebrity.

And then someone else said something too, I can’t even remember, about how thrilled they were to know me. And I thought it was so weird.

I’ll confess. Sure why not?

I always wanted to be ‘famous’.

For one reason.

When you’re famous, when you’re ‘known’, then people will check you out but I’m not sure if that’s really true.

It seems these days people are just ‘famous’. Doesn’t mean you’ll go and actually read their work. It just means you’ve heard of them and you think you know who they are.

And actually, except for the kid who wanted the selfie, I found all these incidents kind of annoying.

I guess I’m fortunate that my immediate family keeps me grounded.
If I ever try to get a swelled head and think I’m all that, they bring me back down to earth pretty rapidly. To the point that I actually feel kind of uncomfortable talking about myself.

I go to family events and functions and keep my mouth shut, just enjoy the festivities, and if someone brings up my books I feel like this isn’t the time or place and no way do I want to steal anyone’s thunder.

I feel like right now I’m in flux. Waiting for a bunch of things to happen that are completely outside of my control.

That’s what’s hard. You wait to hear back from publishers, agents, you name it.

Finished up a project for an educational publisher in the States, and yup, now I’m waiting to get paid.

I feel like I haven’t had much of a summer. It just flew by!

I’ve been working pretty hard.

And then there’s always the correspondence.

You wouldn’t believe how much correspondence is involved in a writing career.

But alhamdu lillah, I’m paying my bills and what more can you ask for, especially in these tough times!

It feels like writing books is a lost cause, that people just aren’t reading that much any more, but my son assures me that no, they are. He sees people reading on the subway all the time.

We started watching Game of Thrones when it came on network television a few weeks ago.

I was highly skeptical.

It’s funny what makes it big. But I have to admit that by the end of two weeks, I did want to know what was going to happen.

I missed that.

Just wanting to know ‘what happens next?’.

So much of the story was just okay, and I found a lot of the nudity and sexuality gratuitous and disgusting, but every once in a while, a character would say something, make an observation, and sometimes the statements would be quite profound.

That’s what I found compelling.

In fact I found it so compelling that I actually caved and bought the books.

Going into Chapters is always a huge disappointment for me.

I can be feeling pretty good about my place in the universe and then I go into Chapters and I see an entire bookcase devoted to Game of Thrones or some other such pop cultural phenomenon and it makes me feel like a complete failure.

And I said so to my hubby and my son. And my hubby said, quite profoundly, “Well,  you just have to write the kind of book people WANT to pick up.”

And he was referring to the fact that currently I seem to write the kind of book people OUGHT to read.

And I found that even more depressing!

Because I thought I already did write books people would want to pick up.

But the thing is, I write realistic fiction. And that is a conscious choice.

All the stuff that is currently popular is mired in the supernatural.

When you believe in aspects of the supernatural, it is very hard, and I even think quite wrong, to trivialize it by writing stories about it.

Anyway, there’s no accounting for what becomes popular. You just have to keep slogging away at the craft and doing the  best that you can.

I’m sure that’s what George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones did.

That’s what I plan to keep on doing.

I feel like if I just keep at it, it will happen.

I also missed a writing retreat that two of my best friends went on.

*sigh*

Had hoped to get a bunch of writing done on my own, but that didn’t quite go as planned.