Again, I am combining my prompts and link-ups. I am nearly through the month and
Just Jot It January, #JusJoJan.
Also, I was lucky to get in first to get to co-host with a couple lovely blogger ladies on another weekly event I’m starting out with, as I liked this week’s sentence starter a lot after my enjoyment with last week:
Hopefully, by combining these two very different blogging projects, one a weekly and the other more of an every-day-for-the-entire-month kind of a thing, perhaps I can introduce two separate sets of writers and bloggers to each other’s work.
The word today is “serendipity” and I can say I learned something that fits that. I learned the true meaning of the word in the year 2015.
I didn’t much like the film of the same name, not sure if I believed in fate, but if you want to call what happened to me an act of
I would go with that.
What did I learn in 2015?
Hmm.
I learned what it felt like to have one of my dreams come true. I learned what it felt like to be able to cross off one of the top items from my bucket list and it all started off rather by luck and coincidence.
I had it all ready and waiting. I’d joined a group of indie writers on Facebook in the idea to write short stories and combine them in a charity anthology. I had a story written by the end of 2014 and I was going to get it published with the rest of them..
As 2015 began things took a turn and I no longer found myself included in the project. It wasn’t the right fit, but what to do with the story I had all ready, written, and waiting?
I guess you could call all the time I spend on Facebook a bit of a time suck, or else, in this case, it became a surprise and a timing thing. I just happened to follow a writer on Facebook who was an author for a small press in the UK. She was put in charge of getting a group of writers together, to submit romance themed stories for an anthology.
I saw the call on her page, messaged her, and in less than a month she was accepting my story. I knew what I was likely lucky enough to have found for myself when I arrived at my thirty-first birthday and first blogging anniversary. I was dying to announce this. I didn’t. I held back because it was so fresh, yes, but also because I was afraid something would happen, again, and nothing would come of it. I was unable to let myself go there.
I was getting my story published, in more than a small group’s idea on Facebook, but backed by a publishing press.
It’s been my dream to be published and to see my words in print, in a book, for a long time. Was this real?
By the summer it was really happening. Little Bird Publishing would be publishing the anthology.
If I had gotten my story published with that first opportunity I would have missed out on this one. If I had already given my story away, promised it to a book, I wouldn’t have had a story ready for this publication.
I call that positively serendipitous.
So, perhaps you thought I might get to the end of this and say that actually I learned that being published would turn out to be not all it was cracked up to be, that I would learn how things you dream of for so long aren’t really usually as wonderful as you think…well, you’d be wrong.
🙂
I kissed the book, held it close, couldn’t stop smiling and even possibly slept with the book next to me for weeks. Possibly.
I am co-host with two bloggers, hosts of the prompt “Finish the Sentence Friday” this week:
Kristi Rieger Campbell of
&
Vidya Sury of
Vidya Sury – Collecting Smiles.
If you want to join and find out about the prompt for the coming week, the place to go would be:
Finish the Sentence Friday on Facebook
To read more fabulous posts, to find out what other writers and bloggers learned in 2015, visit the linkie here:
http://www.inlinkz.com/new/view.php?id=602928
Finally, the blogger to come up with the final Thursday’s prompt word for the month is:
and rules of which are found
Thanks JT for going with “serendipity” as the word because it really fit with the biggest thing I found out/learned from the year 2015 and maybe the story will be made into a movie itself one day soon.
Hey! You never know.
Her Headache 
