Living heroically - the freedom to create

This week I've been reading a book by Eric Maisel titled Making your Creative Mark.   Maisel is an American creativity coach, and the part that caught my attention most was in his chapter titled 'The Freedom Key'.  He says: "you are also free to live heroically, to make yourself proud, and to make your own meaning."  

Faisel asserts that "there is almost nothing that we aren't free to influence."  "The more you see it as your job to exert the influence that is yours to exert," he says, "the more likely you are to spend your days activly making meaning." This really resonated with me.   I love reading about strong, independent women and starships, so that's what I write about.  I created Jian Kabana, a starship coder, and Ria Bihar, an independent trading captain.  I write about the women I want to see in the books I read, and I give no deliberate thought to the idea of making meaning.

Faisel urges us: "Don't retreat from the marketplace because someone criticises you..."  I d this far too often.  "It is our job to remind ourselves of all our freedoms... our freedom to say what we mean," he says.  Part of living heroically as a writer is being willing to fail at a projects.  As Faisel says, "first, gain permission in your heart of hearts to make mistakes and messes."

One particularly relevant comment of his at present is his assertion that we give away our marketplace freedom "by taking silence personally.  "We send things out into the world, and then we wait, and while we wait, all we have is silence."  This is exactly the position I'm in right now with the agent who called in my novel.  Faisel's timely reminder for me is that "we are free to keep sending things out, even as the silence mounts."

Another reminder I need to take heed of is his assertion that "we are free to keep trying a given contact a dozen times, or we can give away that freedom the first time we are met with a ... negative response."  This is particularly relevant to for me.  There are short story magazines I have sent dozens of stories to with no success,  but I also know that the much-published president of the Science Fiction Writers of America took 44 attempts to get a story accepted by one magazine.

So I need to tell myself that I am free to keep going.  Which, as Faisel says, "is rather exceptional - most people start and then stop."  So I'm claiming the freedom to carry on the struggle this week.