Wishful Thinking: Dreams and a Potential Publishing Contract

Sometimes I like to picture that, in ten years, I’m in a beach house at Pochomil or Montelimar in Nicaragua. I would go during the dry season, so it isn’t too rainy while I’m there, and spend the rest of the year at another house on the beach just south of Puerto Peñasco in Northern Mexico.

I don’t want to own these houses or anything, I just want to be able to stay in them and spend all my time writing poetry, essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, and anything else my brain can cook up. My dream is to spend my days running, swimming, and kayaking at the beach, and then write when it’s hot at midday and also at night. Maybe I’d make a friend with a catamaran and go sailing, because I really love that, and learn to scuba dive, since I’ve never done that. I also imagine I’d invite friends to stay in my lovely little beach cottages, and we could take day trips around and eat good food.

This isn’t an entirely realistic goal, and I don’t plan on relying on my just writing for a living, but I would like to someday, maybe after graduation, treat myself and rent out a beach house for a few weeks or a month of writing and living near the ocean. I’ve been feeling that burnout since my junior year of high school, and I really would like just a break from everything and time to focus on my writing with no interruptions.

More realistically, what I’d like to do is become an editor at a publishing house or a literary magazine. I’ll probably start off as a slush reader and work my way up. Though it’s not just writing without a care in a beach house (which is less of a “career goal” and more of a “lifestyle goal”), it’s really my dream to read for a living. And I would, of course, continue to write and publish on the side. I think I’ll live in Phoenix or Los Angeles and have a pool in the neighborhood that I can frequent, which will stand in for the ocean when I’m not on vacation.

I’ve actually been making some progress towards my “writing on the side” goal by submitting a pitch to Dreamspinner Press’s World of Love project, which is a project that will publish gay romances based in countries around the world. Of course, I picked to write about Nicaragua, since I spent the first five years of my life there, and my dad’s side of my family is from there. If my pitch is accepted and my story is contracted, I could make money off of a novella sold as an ebook! I’ll be sure to write a blog post about it once I find out if my pitch has been accepted.

In any case, I think that being an editor and writing on the side sounds perfect, even if I can’t live at a beach house full-time. My current goal is kind of a distilled version of my bigger daydream. But, who knows? Anything can happen…maybe you’ll find me publishing my fourth book, which I wrote at my Nicaraguan beach house, in the year 2027.

Source: https://myinkycloak.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/day-trip-to-the-beach-at-pochomil/

Pochomil. Source.

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