Today I have the pleasure of having Cidney Swanson stop by my blog. She's just released a new book, Unfurl, and I'm thrilled to have her here as part of her blog tour.
Take it away Cidney!
It took two fifteen-year-old boys to
convince me to follow my heart and start writing full time. Fifteen’s this
great age. You’ve survived the battle arena of middle school and probably made
it through your first year of high school. And in some part of you that maybe
doesn’t hover on the surface, you know—absolutely know—that you can do something
great.
Yeah, maybe a person or circumstance in your
life has shoved that knowledge down to the deep end of the pool and tied it
there with a big rock, but you still know it’s there, it’s true, and it really
doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks because you know it.
Look around at the adults in your life: how many
of them still know this, carry it around in their pockets? One? Two? Zero? We
get old and we get tired and we forget that we ever felt this way once. I
mean, adults write sentences like “It’s never too old to be what you might have
been” precisely because we have to see it spelled out in black and white to
even remember what we knew at fifteen.
Four years ago I found Eragon by Christopher Paolini. I was standing
in my Costco, looking at the books table (the coolest part of Costco.) As I
browsed, I overheard these grandmas talking.
“Wrote it when he was a teenager, and he’s
a real nice kid. He home-schooled with one of my grandchildren.”
Well, you can bet that caught my attention. This
gorgeous book was written by a teen? Whaaat? Anyway, I bought the book and
loved it. And I thought to myself, Wow.
This kid: he’s like, fifteen, and he didn’t have any issues with writing a
freaking long book. He just did it. And then did it again.
That same year, I noticed another
fifteen-year-old (my son) knocking out a couple of novels every couple of
months. And I thought to myself: Wow.
Where do you get that kind of belief in yourself and your abilities that lets
you just do what you want to do?
And it’s like this light popped on, blinding me: when you’re a teenager, you know
that you can do anything. Seriously, Teens. Can. Do. Anything. As a
late-bloomer, I’m probably not the best person in the world to convince you of
this fact, but look: someone
else said it too! (Better
than I did.)
So on March
20, 2009, I told myself: “No more ‘I’m-going-to-write-a-novel-someday;’ I
need to just write. Like those fearless fifteen-year-olds. Forget ‘someday.’ This is someday.”
You know how adults or teachers say that their
kids teach them so much? (Yeah, we do say that, and if you’re a teen and the
adults in your own life aren’t saying it, that sucks—they
should, because it’s true!) So anyway, it took a pair of undaunted teenage boys
to teach me that if I wanted to do something bad enough, I needed to just
start. Today.
No matter what your age is: be that
fifteen-year-old version of yourself. And if you are fifteen? Do what you
know you can do. Do it now before you get old and forgetful and busy doing
things that don’t really matter to you anyway. Take it from a late-bloomer.
Nuff said.
Thank you, Chris Paolini, for showing me that
it’s okay to do what you dream of doing and that if you weren’t too young to do it, then maybe I wasn’t too old. And thanks to
my son, the ‘JWS’ to whom I dedicated my first book. Because if it weren’t for
him and Paolini and their teenager-ability to just do stuff, I wouldn’t be writing novels
today.
And that would just be sad.
Thanks
so much, everyone, for the chance to stop by and visit today! Come say hi
anytime!
Linkies:
cidneyswanson at gmail dot
com
Books for sale: http://amzn.to/x8grXl
Librarything:http://www.librarything.com/author/swansoncidney
This is so inspiring. Thank you Cidney and Victorine.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jeanne! Feel free to share with anyone needing to be inspired to follow a dream.
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