Monday, August 29, 2011

Bad day? Keep writing, keep pushing

In self-publishing, there are some days when you feel like you've got it going on. Your sales are up. You scored a good review. You wrote another chapter in that new novel. You're doing great.

This was not one of those days.

This was one of those days when you're reminded of Sisyphus, the hapless king in Greek mythology who was doomed to spend each day pushing a heavy boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom at the beginning of the next.

It's one of those days when everything goes wrong - your links are broken, your computer is frozen and you don't have time to fix anything because after all, this isn't what you do for a living. And you sigh and wonder what it would be like to have an agent and a publicist and a therapist and manicurist and whatever the hell big-name authors get.

And then you tell yourself to shut up because no one likes a whiner. You fix what you can and get help for what you can't. You write, late at night if you have to, and keep writing until that chapter is finished.

You wake up the next day ready to start over because you're not a quitter, you're a writer. An author, even. And you smile at the other authors and you think once again that there ought to be a secret handshake because that's about the coolest thing you can be.

And you feel lucky.

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