Feels like Monday

Two snow days and a bout of some sort of sickness later and it’s time to get back to work.

Agent Rachelle Gardner has an excellent post up. I wanted to blog about it, but she really puts it as simply as need be.

You’ve been told that the published-author life isn’t glamorous and in fact can get pretty stressful when you’re trying to write one book, while doing revisions on another, and maybe even marketing another. And you might think, “This is CRAZY, how am I expected to do this?” But I want you to remember all the times you read on blogs that it would be difficult. And I want you to tell yourself, “Okay, this is what I signed up for. They said it would be difficult, and this is what difficult looks like. I can do this.”

I was thinking of this last night, when I realized I’d wanted to up my daily word goal this week, and instead due to the snow days and the head cold hadn’t written a thing in that time. Another agent, Nathan Brandsford, is asking what keeps us writing, and I’m struggling to find a way to set more boundaries and stick to them, so that people around me know that this isn’t just me playing on the computer. I have a goal (not a deadline, but good practice for one). I have to put in the work. I have to keep the momentum going and take advantage of the opportunities I’ve been given. I’ve had my first taste of success and sitting back on my haunches and enjoying it is all fine and good, but to really use it I have to keep working and transition the momentum from one project to the next, and the next, and the next, to build the cohesive whole I’m looking for.

This is the work, folks. And Rachelle is right, it is harder that I expected. I knew it would take time. I knew it is a process, not just a choice. I knew about slush stats and how to get an agent and how the fight was won. I just didn’t expect it to take this much work.

But this is what this blog always was about. And the light blogging, or lack of deep meaningful stuff (or personal at least), is just part of the process as I focus what time and drive I have on making the most of the connections I’ve made and the accomplishments I can now list.

None of this happened over night for me. Go back, read my archives. Keep in mind that’s not where I started, that’s just where I started on WordPress. Before that I kept a blogger blog, and before that I was writing and submitting and just hoping to have my name recognized at some point.

When I first started out all I had to reference were a small handful of authors who were miles away from where I am now in my career, and I cried more than once because I knew I couldn’t do what they did. Years later I’m not trying to follow in their footsteps anymore, but to make my own way, which, let me tell you, is longer and harder that following anyway. But infinitely more satisfying.

So I share too much here. Or I seem to be a bipolar mess of unstable emotions and tiny victories. But, that’s what the work looks like. This is how it starts, and I want the writers coming up behind and around me to have far more realistic expectations that I had.

This is why they tell you to write every day. It’s not just habit, or practice, it’s how these things linger at a point of nothing, then suddenly (suddenly as in over a few months) snowball into a massive slide of accomplishment. It’s because whether you realize it or not working at it every day is creating a push against the wall and obstacles in your path that leads to the things you want (contracts, readers, books!) coming to be.