I have achieved a long-held dream of mine. I am now a full-time writer.

How did this happen? Pretty simple: about three weeks ago, at a sort of crossroads career-wise, and not sure of which direction to take, I asked myself some deep, searching questions about what the hell I wanted to do with my life. And, in answer to myself, I said, "I want to be a full-time writer."

"Then be one," myself responded.

And so I was. And so I am.

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Within days after that momentous decision, I had two people contact me out of the blue to offer me writing gigs. Not boring, business writing gigs, which I have done in the past and continue to do somewhat begrudgingly each month. No, these are interesting projects that will allow me to channel my wild imagination and off-beat humor into something that will pay me good money.

I don't want to suggest that I magically manifested these projects through some sort of divine intercession or law of attraction mastery. I do believe we can manifest things we want in our lives, but in my experience, the process looks a lot like hard work, determination, and a stubborn refusal to throw in the towel. And--I have to give myself credit here--I've been working toward this for a long time.

Let's back up a few years. Sixteen, to be exact.

At seventeen years old, I knew without a doubt that I wanted to do two things with my life: write and travel.

I knew it so well that I dropped out of high school, skipped college, and set out to make my dream happen. I had my first apartment and I got a job where I worked third shift, eight days on and had six days off. Every other week, I'd pack up my Toyota Corolla and take a road trip. On work days, I'd roll out of bed around 3 p.m. and work on my edgy science fiction novel about a junkie colony on the dark side of the moon (a total piece of crap, in retrospect, but I was really into it at the time.)

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Then, as it tends to do, life threw a wrench in my gears. A series of difficult and traumatic events threw me off my writing game. Unable to tap into my reserves of creativity, I abandoned my novel, and for the next few years, I only wrote in short bursts, and never finished anything I started.

While I was neglecting my calling, I met my husband and started a family. It was tough and beautiful, those first few years of my daughter's life, an irreplaceable experience. I dove into motherhood and all that it entails, surfing the tides of parental exhaustion, financial uncertainty, and marital bumps in the road. Soaking up all the lovely moments--the first words and first steps, the slobbery kisses, the midnight giggle fests. And I continued--perhaps out of necessity, or maybe because I didn't want to miss anything--to neglect my dream of being a writer.

About seven years ago, I began to realign with that dream. I remember the exact moment when it happened. My daughter was five years old and had gone to stay with her grandparents for the weekend. My husband was pulling an all-day split shift at the hotel where he worked. I was home alone, washing dishes, letting my imagination wander, probably for the first time in weeks. And my imagination produced an idea for a short story.

It was such a rare and precious thing, this idea, that I stopped in the middle of my task to write the story.

I didn't have a computer--we were fairly poor at the time--so I rummaged around until I found a spiral notebook with about thirty blank pages at the back, and I wrote furiously for hours. I didn't get up from the couch until the story was finished. I remember that when I finally did get up, my legs were pins and needles for at least an hour. But I had a finished story in my hands.

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That story, too, was a total piece of crap, in retrospect. And so was my next one, and my next. But with each attempt, I learned something new. Found a way of expressing emotion that hadn't occurred to me before, or figured out how to draw out the tension in a bit of dialogue until it threatened to snap. Most importantly, I was actually writing. And while I still wasn't the absolute best at finishing things, my started-project-to-finished-project ratio steadily improved.

Somewhere around this time, I grew tired of working retail and waitressing jobs, and decided to start a freelance writing business. For the past few years, this is how I've earned the majority of my income: writing blog posts for small businesses. I guess you could say I already was a full-time writer, except, no. Just no. When I said, at seventeen, "I want to be a writer," I was thinking of epic works of science fiction and fantasy, not blog posts about carpet cleaning or futon covers. Still, business blogging did form an essential component of the training I've somewhat-unwittingly put myself through over the years--the informal, autodidactic education that enables me to say, now, "I am a full-time writer."

It helped me learn to write quickly and efficiently, to apply myself to the task at hand and to do the damn thing until it's finished. To meet deadlines. To "just say no" to writer's block. To build up my stamina to the point where, now, I can work on multiple pieces in one day without succumbing to fatigue.

All that time spent writing scintillating essays on the nature of pet urine stains in carpet fibers, interspersed with day-to-day household herding and family wrangling, I still managed to eke out some words of pure creative fire. Not as much as I would have liked, or as often. But enough that I never felt as if I was abandoning my dream yet again.

In 2015, I ran an honest analysis of my own fiction writing progress and decided that it was time for me to seek more formal education. I could see that I had advanced significantly since that short story I scribbled out, all in one sitting, in the back of the spiral notebook; however, there were clear holes and gaps in my skill set. So I applied to Odyssey Writing Workshop, a six week, intensive, residential workshop for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. (Major plug here--if you write in one of these genres and want an educational experience that will propel you leaps and bounds ahead of your current writing level in a matter of weeks, APPLY TO ODYSSEY.)

Much to my surprise, I was accepted. After a successful crowdfunding campaign to raise the costs of tuition and lodging, I was off to Manchester, New Hampshire for an unforgettable writing Odyssey. Over six weeks, I learned about plot and structure, style and voice, character arcs and plot tension. I met and befriended fourteen other writers who were into similar things as me and who didn't treat me any differently, even though I was the only one there who hadn't been to college. A core group of us still meet online each Sunday to talk about our writing, and we hold an annual reunion/writing retreat weekend.

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But here's the thing about packing so much information into your brain in one short stint: for over a year afterward, I felt like nothing I wrote was any good. Looking back, I realize that this was mostly due to the fact that I had gained so much knowledge on the science of storytelling that I constantly over-analyzed my work, completely forgetting about the art of storytelling.

In the meantime, I had trouble on the career front and, for two years, I've been trying different ways to make money, all of which turned out to be decidedly Not For Me. I couldn't figure out exactly what I should do with myself. Writing was, of course, my first choice, but I was still stuck in this mindset of "I want to be a writer", instead of saying, "Fuck it. I'm a writer." I just couldn't see my way to becoming the thing I'd always wanted to be. I struggled to redefine myself. I had a few dances with depression.

BUT. I kept writing, anyway.

Through all of life's little ups and downs; through the loss of half of my business blogging client load and two subsequent failed career changes; over the rugged peaks of self-doubt and the valley of depression, I kept writing.

Which brings us back to three weeks ago.

I'd decided to honor my dream by sending myself off to a rugged writing retreat in Tennessee. I had an idea for a novella, and I thought it deserved a week of my undivided attention. The retreat was held on a farm in the foothills of Appalachia, and my lodgings were a tiny, one-room cabin without plumbing or electricity. For some folks, this would be hell, but to me, it was the perfect place to create. And I really impressed myself. For the first time in--ever, actually--I was prolifically creative. I spent hours each day at the keyboard, topping my daily word count record three times over. I knocked out 18,000 words in six days, which was about three quarters of the first draft of my novella.

It was on the way home from the retreat that I experienced the revelation. Such a simple idea, but I was smacked upside the head with the novelty of it.

In order to be a writer, you have to be a writer.

To put a finer point on it, in order to be a full-time creative writer, I have to fully spend my time engaged in creative writing. Not business blogging. Not any one of about twenty other economic pursuits I've tried that barely bring in money and don't feed my soul at all.

I'd just spent an entire week blissfully engaged in setting the world of my imagination down in glorious words on paper. I had so enjoyed the process that I barely even gave a thought to productivity, and yet it was the most productive writing week I've ever had. If I could just do that all the time, I thought, I should have no problem turning it into a lucrative career.

So that's what I'm doing. I'm writing every single day, achieving high word counts, and working on multiple projects at once, most of which are creative and imaginative and fulfilling and fun--that soul nourishing kind of writing that felt so scarce only a few weeks ago. Not just Steemit, although I have been posting regularly here.

And I've been doing it without worry about the money. Even though I'm far from being in a position to stop earning at the moment, I backed out of a non-writing related gig that I agreed to do recently, but which stressed me out and kept me from writing. I've said "no" to a couple of business writing jobs, only holding onto my three oldest clients to keep my very, very baseline financial requirements met while I embark on this new journey of being a full-time creative writer. Of fully investing my time into writing creatively.

Oddly enough, as I began to let go of these not-right feeling jobs, new, infinitely more exciting opportunities began to fall into my lap. I'm not exactly in the fortune-telling business, but I have this unshakeable feeling that this full-time writing thing is going to work out. It's going to more than work out.

It's going to flourish.

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I love you, Steemit!

Hi! I'm Leslie Starr O'Hara, but my friends call me Starr. I live in the mountains of North Carolina and I am a FULL TIME WRITER! I write humor, essays, and fiction here on Steemit and elsewhere.

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@lesliestarrohara