Please welcome our newest contributor, Ann Aguirre, to the WU fold. This is her first post.
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I’m so very excited to be here, and a bit intimidated by my co-contributors, but I will do my best to meet their high standard. Therese gave me a lovely intro here, and if you’re not familiar with me, you can take a look at that.

To many people, it looks like I’ve enjoyed “overnight” success because I sold a great many books in a short time. What they don’t realize is that before 2007–also known as the Year of Many Sales–I had been swinging and striking out intermittently in NY, since 1991. So I’ve done my time in the trenches. I’ve cried over my deferred dreams, and I remember very well sitting where you are and thinking things look hopeless. But here’s the good news: I’ve now written eight of the nine books sold, which is boggling even to me. I’ve done the work. Boy, have I ever.

So let’s talk about how I got to this point. When I was in college, they tried to teach me how to write. I learned all the rules, the grammar, and the circumstances in which such rules applied. I paged through the MLA and the Chicago Manual of Style. I labored carefully and tried to follow each step as though a book were something one could assemble from a paint by numbers kit, and in fact, I’ve seen a few authors assert that one with no skill whatsoever can learn to write with no natural aptitude whatsoever. They state that it is something that can be taught and one can build a book like a car engine or a golf cart.

I disagree with this. At base, I think such works are doomed to be technically proficient, but they lack a quintessential spark. While there are indisputable mechanics involved, there is magic too. Oh, certainly, one can improve the craft. I hope I continue to do so and learn from my mistakes and give it my new, improved best each time I begin a manuscript. But some of us also possess a storytelling soul. We were the ones who whispered the ghost stories around campfires. We scribbled in our tattered spiral notebooks, and perhaps it wasn’t until many years later that we realized, hey, I could do something with this. But the stories were always there, and the characters were always talking to us.

During those years in college, I wrote reams of bad material, work I would never show anyone now unless I wanted to give them a good laugh. I penned reams of execrable emo poetry. I wish I still had that stack, over 200 pages of really impressively black, depressing death-poet worthy stuff, all nihilism and bleakest despair. No meter, of course, because my dark genius couldn’t possibly be constrained in iambic pentameter.

Once I graduated, I found I’d had quite enough of people telling me how-to, and that attitude lasts to this day. For that reason I don’t buy how-to guides. To quote (or paraphrase, if my memory is faulty) Nora Roberts: “It would only make me mad to find out I’m doing it wrong.” One book did have a profound impact on me: The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. However, I must confess I didn’t finish the thing. Like Neil Gaiman, I didn’t want to internalize the patterns and find myself unconsciously writing to them. Therefore, if my work turns out to fit the pattern, then it’s truly archetypal, but it didn’t come from knowledge percolating in my brain.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Just because I don’t color well within the lines, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attend seminars and read how-to books. Or if being a perpetual padawan would muddle your focus, then blaze your own trail. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that your process is wrong or backward. People are always happy to instruct or judge, but they aren’t qualified to say what’s going to make you the best you can be. Only you can do that.

So what’s your goal this year? Sell a short story? Finish your novel? Do you use crit groups or are you lone wolves? I’m going to be checking back to answer any questions you may have.

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Ann Aguirre is a bestselling, multi-published author with a degree in English Literature. She is a prolific writer, with nine releases planned for 2011 alone. She writes romantic science fiction and urban fantasy under her own name. As Ava Gray, she writes high-octane romances. She also writes "hot paranormal apocalyptic action" with fellow author Carrie Lofty under the pseudonymn Ellen Connor. Follow her on Twitter.
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