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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Patience

Patience.  Patience is never something I've been good at.  Especially when I have something to look forward to.

I'm writing two books right now, editing one, and putting the last one online, a chapter every week.  Of the novels I'm working on, one is being written directly in response to a 'calling for submissions' website that looked like something I could break into, and the other has been left hanging more than once because I have no solid plans for it after it's finished.

I feel like I'm being left behind.  I don't have any finished novels, nothing that I can take and show people that is my best, publishable work, and I feel that it's really working against me right now.  The rise of the e-book means that I don't need to go through a real publisher, and there are 'publishing houses' springing up everywhere for these kinds of things that I cannot be a part of just because I haven't finished anything yet.  I always promised myself that I would not publish anything that wasn't my best work, but here I am self publishing entire chapters of my novel that have only gone through one edit and forsaking the novel that I need to write in order to try and rush through a novel to get it published somewhere else.

What do I do about this?  I don't want to be left behind.  I don't want to be standing here next year, wishing that I had taken chances and put my work out there with confidence instead of waiting for it to be perfect and missing the boat.

I'm at an impasse, and it feels like most people are choosing the way that I am hesitant to take.  I have always wanted to be published traditionally.  I am not in this for the money.  If I was, I like to think that I could make it.  Maybe that's a lie, maybe I couldn't, but I would like to think so.  I'm in it because I want the recognition from my peers that I am worthy to be published.  Doing it myself is robbing of me of everything I ever wanted as a child, as a high-schooler, as a young adult.

So, what do you have to say?  Do you council patience?  Or should I try and get everything to an acceptable level so I can publish it as quickly as possible, and try to build up a base I have yet to have any luck with?

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