If you are anything like me (and unless you graduated college a 21 year old virgin, still make your parents schedule all of your medical appointments, and are a vegetarian who hates vegetables, I don’t assume you are) then you are slumming it in your yoga pants with the tiny hole in the crotch wondering what in the name of funnel cakes you should do with your life. And there is a chance, if this at all sounds familiar, that you know elements of what you love, what makes you happy, you are just unsure of how to shape that into a career, or more realistically, something that makes you enough money so you can stop eating store-brand mac and cheese and pizza rolls for every meal.

For me, that is writing. Bliss, to me, is sitting at a keyboard all day and typing utter nonsense. The idea of a career in writing makes me such an interesting combination of ecstatic and nauseous that I am sure some element of it is the way to go. It has just taken me such a long time to stop getting in my own way and take steps to make writing a more substantial part of my life.

After graduating college at the aforementioned wee age of 21, I took the first and only job offer I received, in library administration in the-middle-of-nowhere Minnesota. Since, then the only thing growing on my resume has been library jobs. They are a nice place to be if you like to be around books, an awful place to be if you hate being around people, but honestly, they are the only industry that will consider paying me actual money to do things for them. At one of my more recently acquired library gigs, I learned they don’t have a daily fine policy, but after six weeks of being overdue, a book is “assumed lost,” meaning they have charged the patron and have given up all hope of ever seeing that book again. My writing is like one of those books, this project so incredibly overdue it had been assumed lost. But this is my chance to change that. I don’t want to be lost anymore.