Introducing Michele Lang!!!!

Hello, Sarai and readers!

My name is Michele Lang, and Sarai has generously invited me to post here today. My book, NETHERWOOD, is officially released tomorrow, Febraury 26th, and I am celebrating by visiting friends all over the blogosphere.

NETHERWOOD is my first NY published book, so these days I’m stumbling around, trying to figure out the best way to support it as it becomes a reality. I read articles about profit and loss, sell through, book publicity, coop, etc, and go cold…I love writing with a mad passion but I’m not much of a salesperson.

I forget that not long ago, I was dreaming of this moment, dreaming of a time when I could say out loud “I’m a writer” without blushing. I remember taking the subway to work in New York, catching the reflection of a face in the car windows, and wondering what that woman’s story was, whether she was a ghost of my imagination or somebody sharing my commute – and realizing that woman in the window was me.

I wanted to write, all my life. And when I was younger, I wrote a lot, and easily. But daily life became my writing life’s enemy. I’d get up, run to work, come home, get ready for work the next day. My dreams stayed with me, like a river running underground. But I didn’t know how to connect those sweet writing dreams, those images and ideas that ran through my head, into concrete work – finished stories, finished books.

If you dream of writing, if you’ve half started a bunch of stories and never finished them, or if you have dug in and now face the iron mountain of submission and rejection, I want to tell you that you need to finish those stories, any way you can. Keep going, don’t stop, don’t give up. I’m the same woman I was on that train, the same guilty dreamer – I had everything I needed then to get to this “published author” place, and so do you. You don’t need more time, more talent, or connections. All you need to do is write.

According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel that encourages it to “grow, grow!” And we, too, are graced with angels who root for us when we stumble in the right direction. As a writer, I know for a fact I have an army of writing angels. And many of them are human. Many of them are published writers, far ahead of me on this writing ride. But just as many are people who still dream, people who want to write. All of us are writers. No difference at the heart.

Dream on, writers! And let your dreams spill out over the page.