The Long Hual

Does anyone else caffeinate and then make extraordinary goals and plans?  Mountain Dew Kickstart is my pick me up beverage of choice lately, and when I sip on one, I suddenly feel capable of conquering the world. I think I freaked out my writing partner Brooke Estrada a few days ago when I texted her, “It might be the caffeine talking, but I have an idea....let’s finish the rough draft for Shadow Descending by the end of December.” Just a little info on where we’re at... we’ve got some basic notes and a rough first chapter. We’d previously had a goal to have Shadow Descending done in August of 2019. Brooke is getting underway with it a bit as she has time, but I’m finishing up another project and not contributing much yet. I won’t be jumping in with her and focusing on Shadow Descending until December. That’s when we plan to rev it up and begin constant work on it. So....  writing a book that will be approximately 100,000 words in length in a little over a month is a bit more of a daunting task than the caffeine and my ego want to admit. Brooke admitted she was relieved when I reached out a few days later and said, “Yeah, it was the caffeine talking. We’re not going to write Shadow Descending before the end of the year. That’s a bit of a stretch.”

When the caffeine high ended and I came back down to Earth, I had to remind myself that writing is not some get rich quick scheme. And that the vast majority of authors don’t become millionaires or bestsellers - and certainly not over night. That being said, I don’t doubt the potential of the Luminescent Calling series Brooke and I are writing together or any of my other manuscripts, but I have finally come to terms with the fact that as a writer, nothing reallly happens as fast as you like. There is so much to this process that you just have to settle in for the long haul.

If you are an aspiring author with hopes of writing a bestseller and becoming rich and famous,  I would ask you this: If you won the lottery and became filthy rich, would you still write? If the answer is no, because you would have plenty of money and no need to sell books, then you are probably writing for the wrong reasons. If the answer is yes, then congratulations. You have developed a love for this craft and would enjoy writing regardless of your circumstances! I must confess that I was probably guilty of being in the first group when I started out writing nearly 3 years ago. I was getting burned out at my day job and viewed writing a bestseller as my ticket out of the monotony and into fame-land. How hard can it be? I thought. People like J.K. Rowling went from rags to riches after writing a book, surely I could do the same thing- and then all my problems would disappear! Sound familiar?

As the reality set in of how difficult the writing process is and how competitive this market is, I got a bit depressed and fizzled out. I’d only survived maybe a month of writing and about ten pages! I gave up and moved the idea to the back burner for an entire year. Then, after all that time, I decided to revisit the idea of writing a book. Again my intentions were probably not entirely as they should have been, because I was motivated to be free of a not so pleasant supervisor and viewed writing as a potential escape. But, as I rekindled the idea of writing a book, I went into it with eyes wide open. I hoped it would be successful, but understood it would not be easy at all. I treated like a job. I mentally prepared myself for the grind and decided I would will it to happen. From that point forward, I wrote many days each week. I stayed up late and went into work tired, but little by little, the words began to pile up. And then something amazing happened.... I fell in love with writing. As I got into grooves and scene unfolded in my mind, sometimes I couldn’t write them down fast enough. I think what I loved most was when something unexpected popped up as I was writing and I got to discover something new about the story, just as a reader would. Somewhere along the line, writing no longer felt like work and I joined the 2nd group - the ones that would keep writing, even if they were filthy rich.

Discovering my passion for writing has been quite a process indeed. Although I can truly say I will be a writer for life because I love it, I still have to occasionally remind myself that it’s a long process that doesn’t need to be rushed because we want to get our manuscript to market as soon as possible. We have to be in it for the long hual. It took me a little while to realize how involved the process actually is to complete a manuscript, get it edited and published - so sometimes (when I’m hopped up on caffeine) I get these ideas that I can cheat the process and take the fast track to success, but there isn’t one.

I was inspired recently by something I read in On Writing by Steven King. I’m not sure how I viewed him previously, but I think it was something close to an instant success. I didn’t know much about his history and assumed he probably struck gold with the first thing he ever wrote and has been writing bestsellers ever since, but that’s not the case. Steven started writing from the time he was very young. As a boy he submitted countless stories to magazines. Each time he received a rejection letter, he’d stick it on a nail he had stuck in his wall. Eventually he had so many, the nail fell out of the wall and he had to replace it with a big spike. Steven continued to write and get rejected all throughout his young life. It was until after he’d finished his degree and began working as a poor teacher that he began to see serious success that paid him the big bucks.

So what’s the point? It’s ok to set challenging goals and have high expectations, but we must remember that success doesn’t normally come to those that haven’t worked hard for it for an extended period of time. It’s a process indeed and we must be in it for the long haul. This is a lesson I’m still learning. We don’t have to rush, we just need to keeping consistently working at this creative process that we love. If we do, amazing things will happen! Even if we don’t get rich in the end, we’ll have taken some characters and readers on a grand adventure - and that inand of itself is amazing!