Slowing Down for a Second…

It all gets a bit overwhelming sometimes, the whole writing and promoting a book thing. This isn’t to say you regret any of it because every step, forward or back, is movement and movement is what it takes. When you stop moving you accept where you are at and that’s the danger. Once you accept where you are at then you start to set down roots that are awfully hard to get up again. But darn, it gets overwhelming. As many books as I can sell around where I live, and to friends and family I am still not making a mark in the world. And if you believe in your book, and brother you better, you have to get your work out to the big bad world.

It gets so that you feel like you are always promoting, always shilling your work, and that’s part of the game, of the process, but it also makes you feel a bit like a whore, as if your work is only there to be sold. And it gets dispiriting because if you start to judge your work via sales then you lose sight of the magic that was created as you wrote the book. Even the worst of books are created by some sort of strange magic, and if you lose that, if you lose the memory of that then you start to lose the reason you started writing in the first place. Sometimes you have to slow down, stop shilling, and remember why you are doing what you are doing, and what brought you there. Sure, you need to write. you need to promote, you need to sell, but more important than all of that is keeping the flame in you alive that made you want to write in the first place. You can’t force yourself to write (yeesh, don’t do that, for goodness sake. If you feel the dreaded writer’s block then get out and play, or draw, or dance, or do whatever it is you do when you don’t write and let the story come to you, and it will, you are just pushing too hard, silly!), you have to want to write for it to work. Sometimes ya gotta just slow down.
Take a breath.

So here’s me, taking a breath. Breathing in. Breathing out. And…rats, aren’t I supposed to be looking for an agent for The Meep Sheep? And for A Shadow Over Ever?

Rats.

Remind me to breathe later, it’s back to the grind for now.

c