Last week was a good one.
We finished a chapter of the novella, nudging it up past
17,000 words. we got a nice little royalty check that will keep our dogs in
kibbles for three months. We turned in the edits for the next Louis Kincaid novel
on time.
This week...not so good.
Got some bad news about an upcoming project. Lost a foreign
publisher. Can’t get any traction on the concept for the next book. The
formatting on our Kindle eBook keeps screwing up the paragraphing. And some
anonymous weasel-boy trashed us on Amazon.
You'd think after more than a decade at this writing biz, we'd be immune to the ups and downs. But we’re not. We still get discouraged and
swing from ecstasy to agony. And like the cliché goes, we still go to bed some
nights convinced we’ve used up all my good ideas and that the fraud police will
cart us away in the morning.
We know we're not alone. All writers are like crabs
without shells, that the slightest kick, the smallest snub, sends us into
spasms of self-doubt. We know this so well that it is part of every writing
workshop we teach. Get out now, we tell those who wish to be published, if you
can’t take criticism and rejection at every turn. Your queries will be ignored
by agents. Your manuscripts will be turned down by editors. Your book will be
snubbed by reviewers. Barnes and Noble won’t carry you. You won’t get a
paperback reprint. You’ll be remaindered.
Jim Hall put it in perspective for us once. His newest book
had just come out to glowing reviews. One day, riding high, he was in B&N
and saw a woman reading the first pages of his book. He couldn’t resist and
went over to her and said, “I wrote that.”
She said, “So?”
Rejection and dejection. How do you cope?
How do you keep your head above the waves as you tread
water? How do you keep putting one word in front of the other every day until
you’ve finished that lonely journey of eighty-thousand words? We don’t have the
answer but we've learned this much:
You find support
We're lucky; we are co-authors. When one of us is
on the ledge the other talks her off. If you’re alone, then you need to find
others who understand what you’re going through. You need someone who knows
that when you’re staring off into space yes, you really are writing. You need
someone who will slap you upside the head when you’re whining, tell you the
truth when you’ve lost control of your plot, and buy you two really strong
martinis when you get dumped by your publisher. This someone is usually not
your mom or spouse. They love you too much, poor dears.
You focus in not out
It is easy to get eaten up with envy in our business over
who got the big contract, who got the award, who got the prime Saturday panel
at Bourcheron when you got the 9 a.m. Sunday slot. You have to tune out all
this noise. When we was just starting out, one of the best pieces of advice we got was from Jan Burke. “Keep your head down and just write your books,” she
said.
You have faith
You have faith that you love the process and that you would
probably do it even if no one paid you another dime and had to stand out on the
Kindle corner and give it away. You have faith that some agent out there will
read your proposal and take you on. That some editor will feel the same way
about life that you do and buy your manuscript. You have faith that, despite
all the bad things going on in publishing right now, that readers still need
good stories. You have faith that you can still write them.
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