I know I owe you all blogs, and I have the ideas to write them. But what I haven’t had is the drive. But let’s start at the beginning.
I spent my holidays working at a kennel/doggie day care. It was a fantastic job. I loved it, and the people I worked with too. You noticed the past tense, huh?
It was a seasonal job (yet another seasonal job I should say) and while there was some debate on them keeping me after the holidays in the end they didn’t have the hours to offer. So instead they transferred me to the grooming salon. So I still have a day job, and one I like, but there’s one huge difference that keeps hooking me.
In the kennel almost all my work was directly with the dogs and my coworkers. I didn’t deal with the “pet parents” much. So as long as the pets were safe and happy, and my coworkers were safe and able to do their jobs I was golden.
The salon is…it’s a salon. The people aren’t pet parents, they’re clients. We don’t sell on babysitting services, we sell on face to face customer service, like a people salon. In otherwords, they want me to work on building a client base of my own.
It’s not the only part of the job, because a lot of people come in once for a service then don’t come back for a lot of reasons (like they’re from out of town, or only needed a one time service anyway). But the core of a salon business is repeat customers, so the groomers and bathers (that’s me) are encouraged to make their service real personal.
So, um, this has exposed one of those uncomfortable little facts that you sometimes discover about yourself. Because my name and face will be directly related to my job I’m more anxious about it. Self confidence is something that I’ve been working on (I’ve always been a little lacking). Yeah 2011 was a wringer, but if it did anything it convinced me that I’m a hard working, decent person. I know I can do this job well, and I know I can relate well to other people. The first thing I get from people is usually how nice and friendly I am.
Of course inside I’m convinced I’m a farce and everyone will figure that sooner or later. But that doesn’t matter a lick to the people I work with or for. I know I can do this job, it’s that having my name on it, selling myself in a sense, makes me more nervous about relating to people.
How is that different from selling my writing? It’s not really. You do sell yourself as a personality when you’re an author. I’ve blogged before about how once you start publishing you stop being a normal person and you become a public person. Which is why you shouldn’t do things like complain about bad reviews or be nasty to fans, even when they are being bad/oblivious.
But I’m still at the point that outside of a few cons, a few short stories that come out then fade from the public eye and the odd blog post that gets picked up all over my face isn’t on my work or in the public eye often. Plus, the nature of writing is that even if it was, direct interaction with people would be limited to certain times, or filtered by online formats.
So it’s different writing something that comes out years afterwards, while behind a wall of email and Facebook that’s on a computer I can turn off and building a client list by directly interacting with customers in the flesh.
And, I do feel that way about writing, a little bit. There is nervousness that my next project is going to suck. That I’ll disappoint readers, or my publishers. Or that I won’t be able to hit deadlines once I have to.
So I’ve been facing up to the fact that I expect failure. I expect myself to fail, even if I do my best. And I’m trying to let that go. It’s not easy. But it has to be done.
musings on how to or why the authors write zombie stories. Some try to be instructive, others are more enthusiastic conversations from fans, and most do a fair amount of self promotion (some more fluidly than others). However one has to wonder why we needed 44 authors to say mostly the same thing over and over and how, if many of the authors are new enough to still be dragging out the same most basic writing advice (and admit they only have been in the game for a few months, or a story or two) this book counts as being by ″Masters of the Zombie Genre″. I’m not saying these people have no right to write, or converse about their love of zombie tales, just that this book isn’t written by master writers, and a lot of it isn’t writing advice at all.
