Zelah Meyer

When I was a child I wrote stories, poems and songs. As I grew older I continued to write and even made the mistake of studying Creative Writing as a degree. I say mistake because it taught me nothing about the craft of writing, it merely gave me the opportunity to do so. It also left me with over a dozen years of writer’s block. I still had ideas but the block hung over me in the form of a phobia of actually sitting down and writing! Thankfully, I discovered improvised comedy and NaNoWriMo. Improvisation kick-started my creativity again to a degree where my desire to write was stronger than the block preventing me from doing so. It didn’t vanish overnight and I still fight it but it gets weaker with every word I get down on the page. Improvisation taught me all the things about scene and story structure that my degree didn’t. It also gave me the confidence to know that if I follow my instincts and my imagination, I can create a story out of nothing. NaNoWriMo gave me a target to work for and showed me that I can write even when I don’t feel that I can. I was also able to look back on my 50,000 completed words with a sense of achievement that pushed that block yet further away. I am now working towards slowly bringing four novels from the first draft stage to publishable quality. As I now have a young son, this is going to be a gradual process but I am very enthusiastic about it! In the course of my journey towards authordom, I have been reading up online about all the many things involved in self-publishing and increasingly feeling that I would like to share and comment on these, along with sharing my own experiences and creativity tips. So, I have created this blog in order to do so. :o)