2020: It may be a new decade, but my writing goals remain steadfast

Inspiration is ever-present in my life. Wisps of interesting (and sometimes twisted) ideas for short stories or must-include scenes in my new manuscript are never far on a walk, in my bed or in a half-awake dream state. This afternoon, my dear friend and writer Nic shared his obligatory end-of-decade post which detailed his incredible writing and life journey from 2010 to 2020. And so, once again, inspiration hit. Because aren't you all dying to hear a little snippet of what I'm up to and what writing plans I'm hatching?This decade started for me with a mid-year move in 2010 back to my hometown of New York City. After six years in Boston for my undergrad studies at Northeastern University and then my first job in tech public relations, I was ready to return to the land of my roots. And try to new restaurants and meet new people. Boston is a damn small town.With a journalism degree and a fast-flourishing career in PR, the years slipped by and I was writing for work more often than I was writing for fun. But the writing for fun never stopped. The following years were filled with freelancing for online magazines sporadically in my free time, feverishly putting down inklings of overly dramatic and anguish-filled poetry all having to do with my tumultuous love life, and once in a great while, playing around with non-fiction essays and spurts of dystopian fiction.That is until June 2018. The spot: a grassy hill in front of the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The time: the Saturday morning after Bourdain died. The idea of a character, very much like me but not me, jumped into my head and I hand-wrote a first chapter about a woman in tech who was enamored with all things food and food-industry, but who was stifled by her tech job. Sounds autobiographical but it wasn't. It isn't. The story is a an exaggeration of events that I've seen happen firsthand, read numerous exposes about, and feared/excitedly anticipated my entire career. And so the story was born.Then I went ahead and ignored it for about four months. Until my body woke me up in the middle of the darkest morning hours in the middle of November and I transcribed all my handwritten notes. Drawn to this character, this world, I kept writing that morning. And a narrative started taking shape. And scenes and new characters introduced themselves to me. Twists and turns and chapter titles welcomed me to them, a lamb sauntering to its mother to snuggle in for a lifetime of comfort.The next three months were a blur of early mornings, attempts to write in coffee shops and diners and the first-ever fiction novel I'd finished to date. Sure, there was a non-fiction book of essays (completely untouched and unedited) clocking in at over 265 pages that I'd eked out around 2012, but that wasn't like this project. This was something that had real potential. A story I wanted to shape, and think about and make the best I possibly could.On the recommendation of friends, I began devouring craft books in 2018. In 2019, I read five craft books all of which were helpful in so many ways. SAVE THE CAT helped me salvage my insufferable protagonist. STORY GENIUS helped me refine my theme and learn a ton about the publishing industry I hadn't learned before. And ON WRITING (Stephen King's version) made me feel amongst a friends. I've found my tribe. The emotional connection to writing and the happiness and freedom I feel when my fingers are flying across a keyboard or I'm all thumbs starting to make sure I don't forget an idea mid-train ride or con a city block rushing off to a yoga class, that's all I want in this life.So I revised my book. Then I sent it to my critique partners/friends/toughest writer critics for some REAL TALK (aka harsh, realistic and much-needed constructive feedback). I rewrote the book again. Sent it to beta readers to get earnest, potential "layperson" feedback and reactions. Then I rewrote it again. This bad boy was on its sixth or seventh version and each time it was getting stronger. I was starting to shed every last fragment of ego. The revisions will never be done, the book can always be strengthened, the language always tightened. Kill your darlings. Exclude unnecessary words. Stop overusing the word "just," Dinah. (Control-F was invaluable on that front).My best friend and writing professor, soon-to-be published author, gave me the harshest feedback. It was exhilarating. I now had in my possession so much I could work with! This is directly correlated to my twelve years in PR and marketing, but revisions and edits are a dream come true. Yes, tell me what to work on. Tell me what doesn't work for you. Let me have a chance to change it, fix it, come up with something wholly different.And so I embarked on another revision. On his urging, I applied to the first-ever Gotham Writer's Conference. Day one was open to anyone, but day two was an invite-only roundtable session with seven other writers in your genre and two honest-to-god literary agents specializing in the type of writing you write, dear writer. And I was accepted based on a query letter and my first ten pages. It was my first writing conference, my first encounters with literary agents, and it was incredible. I've summarized it for you in excruciating detail in this post.The feedback on my first two pages was ROUGH. Perhaps I shouldn't start where I started the story. The imagery was cliched, everyone knows this is what San Francisco is like. Where is the action? Stop showing and start telling (my forever-problem that I'm working on overcoming). And I said thank you and smiled more that day than maybe I ever have.The next day, I opened up a new document. I knew that the meat of my story, 80% of it, was really strong. It was THERE. But the beginning. That was a darling that needed to be taken out back and made to "disappear." So I started from scratch and wrote a brand new opening. Mid-action, a completely new idea, and it worked.I felt it was ready to go, ready to pitch to agents, and so I did. Currently, I've got a dozen rejections some of which are so nice I have screenshots of them and show them to my friends and family because they are so encouraging. Feedback like "your story is so compelling and kept me invested the entire time" or "you're clearly a very talented writer" or "there's so much to admire in your manuscript" make it all worth it. These are rejections, mind you!And as the new decade has dawned, dozens more agents have my pages, several have requested the ENTIRE MANUSCRIPT (a huge feat in and of itself to stand out in the query trenches enough to get requests for partials or fulls) and I'm feeling good. All of the rejection information I've been able to gather is that I haven't found THE ONE yet. But we are on our way to each other, this oh-so-special agent and I. The book works, it's about connecting with the right person so they can advocate for it and me as much as I would myself.This whole process is freaking exhilarating. And I've never felt more than a real writer. I participated in NaNoWriMo this year and whipped out over 34,000 words of a brand new fiction story. On a random winter morning walk, an idea for a short story with a heavy dose of magical realism came flitting by. I've never been one for magical realism writing (reading, yes) and so I finished a first draft of that as well. It needs a ton of editing, but there it is, in my archives, freshly born out of my mind and ready to be hacked away into something consumable. A second short story idea swam in front of my mind and I'm plugging away at that. The inspiration is everywhere.All this to say, I'm in the thick of it. And it's fun. I wouldn't do it if it wasn't fun. Do I have this unrelenting and steadfast desire to make it (ya know, really make it, get a literary agent, publish with a top five publishing house the traditional way, experience the success as clearly as I imagine it)? Yes, I do. It's a strong feeling in me and it keeps me going. What's been most important is how much my personal writing as strengthened my love and enthusiasm for me day job. Because it has. It's an outlet for so much inside of me that's so difficult to articulate. I can play out any type of scenario I want. I can make people (characters) say or do anything I so desire. And it's incredible.This is how I see the decade starting off: 2020 is going to be a whirlwind of writing as much as I can, reading all I can consume in my free time, and fully immersing myself even more so in the literary agent querying process. In addition, I'm trying to gather 100 rejections as I forge my path to acceptances, yes's and a literary agent to call my own. I'm applying to writing residencies and retreats, and submitting short stories, essays and poems to lit mags. Why not? It's the most delicious type of fun. Putting yourself out there into the world, a raw nerve begging for consumption for adulation, and getting smacked onto the rocks by the heavy, ragged wave of rejection. Knowing how easy it is to get back up and try again has strengthened my character in unimaginable ways and I'm becoming a better person for it in every aspect of my life.Cheers to writing. I raise my glass to the new year, the new decade, and everything the future has to offer. May your future be brimming with more reading, writing, travel and adventurous of passion than you know what to do with. I can only hope for the same for myself.