Warning: Ranting and Raving ahead.
So, after an incredibly productive day yesterday, I decided the best (not) use of my time today would be to sabotage my progress. How did I do that, you wonder? Well, by losing my momentum by considering all the people/blocks/challenges standing in the way of my selling a book any time soon. ARG! I hate it when I do that, but it's what I do when the waiting gets to me.
First of all, I have to complain a little. When I spend $25-$30 dollars entering a writing contest, it would be really nice if that contest kept to their deadlines. Going 3 weeks past and leaving all of us in limbo is crap. I'm not even concerned about finaling at this point, I just want to know my results. And it's not like they had a short turn around. They've had the entries since NOVEMBER 15th. That's over 3 months. This business is all about waiting. It sucks. That's why I like contests. You know they're going to announce finalists and winners by a certain date. Good or bad, at least you know the answer by then.
I think I've read one too many first call stories this week that involve two weeks or less from submitting the story to receiving the call. It makes waiting months and months (during the winter months especially harder) to receive a "no" that much more difficult to swallow. Oh, my stuff is still out there. It's just the winter blues (and 8 more inches of that horrid white stuff) getting me down.
And to make it worse, I did something really bad today. I did some analysis on the number of SSE and Desires being published divided by the number of authors and came up with this nifty little range. 31-35. That's how many authors get published in a given year. Now, if you look at the track record for the last two years and don't see a lot of changes in authors or the number of books they produce in a year, and then you see how many new authors they've bought and realize that in the first year they may only sell 1 book, but year 2 there might be more like 3, that leads you to this conclusion: Where is there going to be room for me? And then you start looking around at all the competition out there and well...
See, I told you I was bad today.
Today's goal: Chapter 11
Yesterday's accomplishment: Chapters 9 and 10 (Whoohoo)
What I'm grateful for: Oh, hell, I don't know. It's been a long day
Quote: "Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember, that's where you will find success." -Thomas J. Watson
