Saturday, October 3, 2020

Gotta' Have It


Can you see that spider web? It was so gossamer, I could barely see it, but look at the its intricacy, and imagine the patience of that little spider. I'm glad I don't have to work that hard for my dinner.

Dear fellow writers, or interested parties, I’m happy to see you here. Thank you for checking in. I’m thrilled that people are finding my site, although I don’t know how. Please join me again. I’d love to see your smiling face.

Ta Da!

The advantage of self-publishing is that you can un-publish yourself.

I self-published “Where the Birds of Eden Sing” because I wanted to complete the project I had worked on for so long. I needed the completion. And I felt my book needed a chance to fly. Alas, poor baby, it floundered; maybe it needed to be placed back in the nest. A cat didn’t get it or anything. True I didn’t promote it much. I was waiting…for what? Lazy, not ready?

I unpublished it yesterday, for I want to work on it some more. It will not endlessly rework it, as some writers do and never complete the thing, but I’m taking Book II and making it into a novel on its own right. People like romance novels, and it is primarily a romance.

Once I was told that this story didn’t have enough conflict between the characters. Damn conflict! Gotta’ have it. “Without it,” so they say, “you have no story.”

Rather flies in the face of how we want our lives to be, doesn’t it?

My new as of now unnamed book does have conflict near the end, but if nobody reads to that point (like editors), they will never know it.

Do you have any of these issues?

Because of the time involved in conventional publishing and my age, I felt that I didn’t want to wade through that process again. (It took two years from acceptance to publication for The Frog’s Song, and then I can’t sell it unless I am physically present—seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot.) But if I think of myself as eternal, it won’t matter—you know, it can happen in this life or the next.

Have a dream more significant than you, so I’ve heard.

 

Walt Whitman wrote:

“And whether I come into my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years. I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait…”

I’m not that patient!

 “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

"You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

--Steve Jobs