Fifteen minutes. That's all the time I have to write today -- I have to finish packing for our vacation and finish getting the house ready for our absence, but I'm giving myself fifteen minutes to write.
Fifteen minutes are not enough to revisit the current Work in Revision. When I enter that world, I'm transported in time to another place where heroes and heroines fight against time to save the world. Fifteen minutes won't even get me through the portal. The quarter hour will become an hour and a half. Can't do that today.
I could spend this time writing posts on one social network or another, but that's not creating,
that's regurgitating
and trolling
and stalking. Don't feel like that today.
Today, I feel like connecting with my blog again. So here I am.
I've been thinking about the writing business. To me, writing is not difficult. Revising, although tedious and frustrating, is fun for me. It's the BUSINESS part of the phrase that handcuffs me and makes me beg, Please, Sir, may I have another ... rejection? Because a dozen for this thing I call my reason for living is simply not enough.
I can blame bad luck for the dearth of favorable reactions, but, no. Luck has nothing to do with it. Simply put, my problem is that I don't know how to sell myself.
In the spirit of 50 Shades of Gray: I am a Submissive in a Dominant world.
My thinking is more in line with -- Write it and they will come. (Field of Dreams)
That thinking is wrong. In this crazy publishing world, there is no magic genie who will blink her eyes and hook you up with a publishing contract. The writer has to work at it. Hard. Selling something I think should be able to sell itself.
And that's often the problem.
Those of us who write very often prefer solitary lives that we can enjoy with the characters that flow from our fingertips. That won't work.
Some writers have resorted to bypassing mainstream publishing. They write their fabulous tome, sometimes pay a freelance editor to read through it, and then call up an independent publisher who will then print up a few on demand and put a link on Amazon. For most people, that's okay. That's acceptable.
But for others, especially those: * in mainstream publishing,
* in the media that provide reviews,
* and in those writers' own peer groups,
jumping to the self-publishing route is a sign of weakness.
I agree. For me. If I were to go that route, I would be very disappointed in myself because my ultimate goal is to have high school students ravenously flock to my books. Lately, the only people flocking to e-books are hungry wives looking for a gray-eyed lover. That was a fluke, folks. People have been self-publishing for ages, but that rarely (if ever) happened before.
Instead of giving in, I'm using this summer vacation to work harder on refocusing my talents in order to better sell myself. Hopefully, 2012 will be the year I finally get an agent, the next logical step in this long, arduous nightmare we writers subject ourselves to. I will, however, keep my options open.
My fifteen minutes are up. ... or are they?
Until the next post ....
