Today, I’m supposed to do a glimmer-of-gold post. Looking back, I have already done one on kids, so I had to search for a different topic. I decided to go with writing!

Writing is like a moving target. When you write something that you think is pretty good, you feel proud, right? Well, then you come back years later to it with the intent to make a few touch-ups here and there, and you end up completely rewriting each paragraph. At least, that is how it is for me.

Because I don’t have a lot of time to write due to the age of my two youngest kiddos, I thought I would try to do just a little easy writing work by looking over an old fanfiction for the purpose of cleaning it up. But every time I come back to it, I (foolishly) start at the beginning of the first chapter to make sure it seems smoother, and I keep rewriting what I had already rewritten! This word is inaccurate, that sentence is clumsy, this sentence should just be deleted – and so on! It reminds me of the quote about a dog going back to its own vomit. I keep thinking to myself, “I thought this paragraph was fine!”

After having written more than a million words creatively in one form or another, you would think I would know better how to get it right or at least “good enough.” But every time I come back to a piece of writing, I bring a new me. Maybe I’m a me that is tired or cranky, or maybe I’m a me that is fresh and eager. While I do think I have learned a lot more about good writing since I first published something, I think I will always be the kind of person who will want to write and rewrite stories.

Though all of this can be frustrating, the glimmer of gold is two-part. First, as someone who self-publishes, I can always make the decision to come back to a story years later to update it. Second off, it shows that I am constantly growing as an author. Every word I read and hear changes me, and I think there is something magical about that.