Party of ONE
Recently I decided that my work-in-progress, a crime novel, had been a work-in-progress for way too long—several years. The word count was only about 15,000—a good start, but that was it. I sat down and had a talk with myself: one of those hard, uncomfortable conversations.
I acknowledged two things: My habits had slipped, and I’d been letting too many other projects get in the way. For an independent writer and editor, it’s easy to overcommit:
“Can you do this?”
“Yes!”
“Can you do it tomorrow?”
“Yes!”
Authors have to handle so much more business these days than ever before—we all know that. Experts on publishing tell us to suck it up, get on with it, find a way to do everything: gotta have a website, say yes to social media, blogging, podcasting, advertising, metadata analysis … Fewer hours to write? Well, produce more and faster when you do write! Simple!
The experts omit mention of the learning curve: the investment of time and mental and emotional energy required to get up to speed on a new initiative.
The fact, at least for writers, is that you can’t do everything every expert says you must. Believing you should just makes the stress worse.
And here’s another thing: Somewhere during my self-meeting, I realized with a jolt that I’d
