Starting this website
I was born in 1991, around the advent of modern computers and internet use. I spent my teenage years terminally online. I used to write in journals in high school, but I don’t think I’ve done that since I turned eighteen. Now I do everything on my laptop.
When I was 21, I finished a book and tried to get it published. I always wanted to be one of those younger adults who became a writer, but after about a year of shopping around for an agent, it was not to be. My career path tilted toward psychology, experimental psychology, and finally clinical therapy. Writing became a hobby.
Then in 2016 I wrote a new story called Planetary Maps. I tried to get an agent and, once again, had no luck. After about a year, I stopped trying. During the pandemic, I revisited PM. I really liked what I had to say in it, but I had other modernize it a little bit. It also wasn’t very long, with only 50,000 words. So I extended the story, fleshed out the characters, and finally finished all my edits in 2023.
Now it’s February of 2025, and my efforts to find an agent have followed the same trend as every other time I’ve tried to find an agent. That is: it’s not going well. And I think one of the reasons this is true is because I’ve dedicated very little of my time to building a name for myself.
Why?
Well, I didn’t bother submitting to any contests or journals. My confidence in my writing wasn’t that strong, and it’s a lot of work for very little reward. It wasn’t going to further my professional career as a therapist. It just felt like a waste of time.
As for social media, self-promotion either fell into the category of not caring enough to do it or actively damaging to my mental health. Though I spent almost all my time online as a teenager, a lot of that was escapism. Now that I was living a life I was happy with, I found that validating myself online was actually harming me.
And now here I am, at 33 years old and starting my first ever writing website. It sounds like a lot of work, and that scares me, but I’ve been a little down recently that I don’t write enough. I am hoping this turns into a motivation rather than an obligation. And maybe, if I’m lucky, this will also help me get my book published in the long run.
Fingers crossed.
With love,
~Kaci Madison