Reading Barbara Sher's Wishcraft, I finally had to sit down and decide whether or not I was willing to make those old dreams of mine come true. I had to seriously ask myself whether or not I wanted to be a writer. At first, I found myself hesitant to decide. The dream hurts a little bit more than it used to -- too many long dry stretches with no words at all, too many false starts and empty promises to myself. And yet, considering the alternative, I felt my heart breaking. In the end, I chose to take that chance.

I am a writer. Once upon a time, I thought that was all I was -- how fortunate that those days have passed! Now I know myself as many things: a reader, a singer, a SCAdian, a seamstress, an amateur Jungian, a student, a teacher, a healer, a classicist, a Latin speaker, a devoted Moby Dick fan . . . the list goes on and on. I am large. I contain multitudes. Yet twining through each of those identities is the overwhelming focus on language. There are gifts I have found, and gifts I have lost, and gifts I have traded away in order to fit myself into that round hole that I once thought life had assigned for me. But throughout my life, there has only been one gift that I've clung to desperately, unable quite to picture myself without it. I know now that I can survive without writing, but it is a dark and empty life, scarcely worthy of the name. Scribo ergo sum.

The long and short of things is that I will no longer be posting my newer poetry to Deviant Art, although I may well begin posting it on lj, under a filter. I'm never going to get published if I keep posting my work for free on the internet, and as daunting as the submission process seems, I can't keep avoiding it. I may still upload some of my old work, since none of it is really good enough to get published, or at least, I think it's not. I'm not a very good judge of my own poetry, and I'm a bit too out of touch with the modern poetry scene to really say how mine matches up. I've got to try, though. It's time that I started treating my writing seriously.