Technically yes, I’m a writer. My first short story sold to Gothic.net years ago. it literally came in time to pay my rent. I’ve sold to semi-pro markets here and there. a story to Baen books for their magazine, and i’ve written a couple of stories with a collective of actual authors as part of their online self-pub series. (I still don’t know why they’re letting me hang around with them.)
Impostor syndrome? yeah, I have it. I “quit” writing for a number of years, only working on stuff for the collective web series. I’ve never finished a novel. I have problems with plots. I don’t seem to get them. but i got one a couple of days ago, and I figured, “how about we don’t pants it this time and see if we can get to the part where it says the end by organizing a bit?”
so i am running a free trial of scrivener, and so far i’m really digging it. (I hope I can get it working on linux, because sometimes I have to live the cliche of writing in a coffee shop and my netbook runs on linux.) I was happily working on my characters, research, plot outlines, and then I got reminded that I have a deadline for that collective up there.
Ugh. I generally try to work on one project at a time, but nearly immediately that wasn’t practical. so I decided to take what i had of my project and put it in scrivener, and wow. it’s really helped. I think I’m sold on it as a story organizer; it certainly helped me see that I had too many characters demanding POV in what isn’t supposed to be a novel sized work. I also had a great way to impose a structure on the story by using the manuscript outline and index cards. I kinda want to grab all of my long works in progress and make scrivener projects for them and see if they help me with getting some of those finished.
The clarity I get from organizing in scrivener is awesome. I look forward to writing my first novel. I can use it to keep my head up when writing for the project. and maybe i’ll be able to say “I’m a writer” without cutting it off at the knees with “well, technically…”