My Writing Year: The end of the beginning (my writing business)

Friday evening, just before sunset, I stood in the ditch along our country road. I was live streaming the Rosh Hashanah service, a necessary adaptation to my observance of the ritual because of the ten-month-old puppy tugging us through the grass.

I did my best to process and understand the Hebrew prayers and songs as they flowed past, captivated more by the music spreading into the multicolored horizon. I smiled, inviting in a moment when I embodied the music and the mindset of the main character in my young adult novel accepted for publication.

Hineni.

I heard the phrase clearly, repeated at least three times in an unknown song.

Hineni. Here I am.

I wrote a post with that title the year before, the final chapter in my blog series based on a reading of Abigail Pogrebin’s book, My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew.

Hineni. Here I am, at the beginning of a new year, a time to celebrate and take account. And this year with more than one good reason. I had elected to follow the My Jewish Year series with another, My Writing Year, a spin-off secondary interpretation of a different kind of foundational text, The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman. New works published, including a novel. New positions assumed, volunteer and paid. New educational and networking opportunities. The sun sunk lower, pinks and blues turned magenta and orange. I had a great writing year, and I hadn’t finished… reading Friedman’s book.

The next day I removed the book from the shelf and skimmed the table of contents for the missed chapters. I hadn’t read the sections in order, but I discovered the remaining pages were the final chapters, and those chapters were about the business part of being a writer.

“By taking your work seriously, and seeing it as a venture intended to produce a profit, you’re shifting your mindset from ‘aspirational writer’ to ‘working writer’,” Friedman says (317).

She continues. Writers don’t have to make money to call their collective work a business, and showing evidence of being an entrepreneur through expenditures and sales, even small ones, matters. My writing dream hadn’t changed, I did want a literary agent, but the agent I needed was a tax one. The new year was a time for settling accounts—my soul and apparently my entrepreneurial spirit—and it was time to open a new one.

I made several publishing (to keep the distinction from writing) choices during the year in the spirit of Jewish tradition, the understanding comes in the doing—fake it ’til you make it. The line thins as did the color on the horizon until there is no distinction. Things become real by believing they’re real. 

On Yom Kippur, the Book of Life will close, and names recorded for beginnings and ends. Though difficult, there is another name that needs to be on the books, for tax purposes.