Today we’d like to introduce you to Belinda Rae Sacco
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
As a kid, I always loved stories. I was a massive bookworm and came from a long line of bookworms (my mother was a big sci-fi nerd and my grandmother was a poet.) Because my brother and I were homeschooled, my mother often found time to read to us while we practiced our cursive and there was a lot of time to create and get lost in books.
As I got older, the dream of being a published author never died and I spent most of my teenage years writing blog-hosted stories and chapters and drawing original comics.
I studied creative and professional writing in college, hoping to get into publishing, but when I was unsuccessful, spent some time teaching for Baltimore County before coming to the conclusion that I was a little too right-brained for longterm work in the American education system. I got my masters in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore, which was a very experiential mix of writing workshops, graphic design elements, and entrepreneurship.
I published my thesis, Singing to The Dark, a collection of short stories, in 2023, started my website and never looked back. Since then, I’ve put out two ebooks of poetry on my website Raesaccowrites.com and worked as a freelance designer for a couple local companies.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Figuring out some of the marketing was a struggle at first. Up until publishing my book, I had, with the exception as a stint teaching yoga and offering reiki, only worked as an employee, so developing an entrepreneurial mindset took some time.
Also, Singing to The Darks publishing coincided with me losing my job at a local jewelry story, so figuring out how to market and sell the books was extra stressful.
Luckily, I was able to supplement my income with design clients and work at a daycare, so some of the stress was alleviated.
Although there are definitely successful marketing practices that are formulaic (especially in the age of social media and Google Analytics), I consider marketing another venue of creativity, and the brain creates best, I find, when not in a state of fight of flight. Both as an artist and as a business owner, you need to adopt an abundance mindset and be willing to try new things. It’s a lot harder to shed limiting beliefs and market yourself and your work when you have rent barreling down on you. For this reason, I found working part-time at other businesses helpful while developing my own brand and voice, which sounds very highbrow, but is really just me being myself, giving career advice on my blog, and publishing my poetry on social media.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
These days, I write and publish a lot of poetry–whatever happens to be on my mind and nagging at me. The theme I’ve been exploring most in my work lately is self-acceptance, because there is no greater or more influential relationship than the one we have with ourselves.
I’ve also written a lot of fiction focusing on families and trauma. My short story “Ugly” was published in the 2018 edition of Welter, a local literary magazine. It’s about a young woman named Christina driven to reflect on her troubled relationship with her mother after finding the mother dead in Christina’s childhood home.
The stories in Singing to The Dark also have some darkness in them. I’ve written about heartbreak, divorce, miscarriage… the list goes on. The darkness, however, is not the point of the stories, but the catalyst of them. The point is to find light in the darkness, joy in the pain. All of us in life have something to overcome or heal, and that’s what the stories are about. How do we find clarity in chaos? How do we forgive? How do we heal?
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Don’t be afraid to ask for help, but also don’t be afraid to fight for your vision. It’s okay to fail. It’s okay to fall down. Everything is a learning process. The important thing is, we learn.
Pricing:
- Singing to The Dark
- $15 plus shipping
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Raesaccowrites.com
- Instagram: @raesaccowrites
