Tag: dailyprompt-1918

The Risk of Moving Away

Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.
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I moved out to Missouri because of a guy, and I ended up breaking up with him after three years. I don’t regret this a bit.

Generic Small Town

Moving here, at first, was difficult because the town I ended up in was rural, very rural. It did not have the upstate New York ambience with its cafes, restaurants, and quirky people. It did not have the beauty of the hills of Oneonta. But I was here because of a relationship I thought had promise.

It didn’t. After three years of stagnation, I broke up with the man, and I was stranded in middle of nowhere Missouri. I made the most of it, got tenure, and was well-established in the town by then. After my childhood in a small, violent town, I could live just about anywhere, and so I stayed in Missouri. I bought a tiny house and established myself.

Maryville was not a great place to find a husband. Most professors are already married, or else there is a reason why they are not. Then I met my now-husband over Match.com. That’s the beauty of a small town — the Internet still reaches there. It was a long-distance relationship for a while, but only 2 1/2 hours away. We dated long-distance for a while until he finally moved down here. And then we got married in our small town.

Meanwhile, we’ve had several cafes over the years, and this has helped make Maryville hospitable. Cafe culture livens up a town and feels like community. We also occasionally go to the big city — Kansas City or Omaha or Des Moines — for a weekend writing and eating good ethnic food.

If I hadn’t moved here, I would never have met my husband, because Des Moines is far from Oneonta, NY. I probably wouldn’t have met anyone to be with, because Oneonta had the same problems as Maryville for dating. I probably couldn’t have afforded a house (much less the bigger house Richard and I moved into). I don’t regret a thing.

Publishing — A Risk I Don’t Regret

Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.
View all responses

Indie-publishing a novel was a risk. Writing it was a Big Audacious Goal, but I could have left the book in a file folder forever. Letting it out there for people to read was a big risk.

What is the risk of putting my work out there for others to read? There’s a risk of being ridiculed, of being ignored, of losing one’s confidence in oneself. These bring up a lot of fear, like standing in front of a door, not knowing what is on the other side.

I took the risk by walking through that door. My first book published was a Christmas romance, The Kringle Conspiracy. It was a project whose seeds were planted in a high school short story I’d written. To publish, I had to edit the document, run it across some beta readers, and then the hard part: uploading it onto KDP (Kindle’s publishing arm) and hitting the button to publish.

I could have walked it back. I could have unpublished it before the wheels of KDP released it to the public, but I did not. I took the risk.

My results have been mixed. On one hand, I have not had a lot of readers (except for the 3300 who read it for free in exchange for getting put on my newsletter list.) On the other, the few people who have reviewed it have given it 4.5 stars out of five. It’s a modest success, but that’s not the reason I took the risk. I took it because it was another Big Audacious Goal, one that I could only accomplish through stepping through the door.