This week was a lesson in bad timing. Hurricane Nicole got the better of me forcing me to reschedule my first book signing. It was a hard call to make. My heart still hurts at having to make it. There’s no question that it was the right call. So, we’re working on updating the book signing tour dates and getting new info out on social media. So far, things have been quiet with the book launch. We’ll see how it all goes.
Drawing from the Well
This week, I was pleasantly surprised by my progress. I finished Arc II, which was great, but then I opened up Arc III Part I to find it already read and edited! So that jumped me far forward in the first edit. So now, I’m working on Arc III Part II. It’s coming along. It’s definitely too thin which gives me a lot to work on throughout the rest of the editing process. The bones look okay so far, though. More to come!
Arc I: 64/64
Arc II: 60/60
Arc III Part I: 24/24
Arc III Part II: 10/31
Arc IV: 0/43
Arc V: 0/59
Interstitia: 0/11
Total: 158/291
Filling the Well
I made some progress on catch up this week. I finished Frostbite by Adrienne Woods which was great, best book in the series so far. I’m working through Moonbreeze in the same series now but it’s a definite letdown. I also read Change from the Inside Out and Talk Think Create on getAbstract. They were both good, though I didn’t learn a whole lot I hadn’t already thought about. I’m still trying to chew through as much as I can to catch back up to pace on my Goodreads goal.
84/100 for #ProjectBookworm2022
Not much on this front lately. We finished our second watch-through of Ink Master. We’re working on catching up on shows after a couple of weeks of excessive busy-ness. Other than that, I watched one whole episode of The Flash, which I’m still trying to catch up on. There’s a lot of that going around lately.
Dragonflight Pre-Expansion Patch Part 2 hits Tuesday, bringing Dracthyr Evokers into the fray. I can’t wait to check them out. All quiet, other than that.
Well Chat
As I said above, this week was a bad case of bad timing. It isn’t my first, though. Last Friday, my book came out. Finally. I’ve worked on this for fourteen years at various levels of intensity. The original idea was pure escapism. Over the years, I put more into it, diving DEEP into building the world. That was before I had ever heard the term world-building, however self-explanatory it turned out to be. This was before I knew an ounce of what I know now about the craft of writing itself. I just wanted to build the world, the magic, the countries and cultures. It was years before I even thought up the first character. I wanted a deep world with a believably long history. I had no idea how hard that was to write.
There were plenty of false-starts between then and now, but the biggest one came because of the pandemic. No surprise, I know. I remember distinctly being at a Christmas party in ’19. I told some friends, “Next year is my year. I’m finally going to publish my book.”
And then the world stopped.
The money I had intended to budget for publishing went to paying the bills. I don’t begrudge that. My family is my number one priority; dreams take a backseat, always. ’20 came and went and ’21 came around and I just wasn’t ready. Life wasn’t in the right place. The pandemic was still raging and then we moved. At that point, I started planning for this year, for right now. And here we are.
I want to put some special focus on that bump in the road, though. I thought the timing was going to be perfect, that my book would come out in 2020. The world had other plans. My heart sank when it all happened. I knew immediately that my book was NOT coming out in ’20 like I wanted. I swallowed and accepted it, but I didn’t like it. I was discouraged. The important part was that I wasn’t defeated. I took those intervening two years and refined my strategy. There was a lot to learn and there still is, there always will be. I made my plans. There were myriad discussions with my wife to make sure I was on the right track. Gobs of research brought me to my final plan…which changed again as things developed.
The key here is that I never quit. It would have been easy to do so. The pandemic was a sucker punch right into everyone’s gut. It was something unseen in the modern world. Literally, a century has gone by since something of that virulence and magnitude struck. I could have let go of my dream, taken that as a sign that I wasn’t meant to be a published author. My heart wouldn’t let me, though. So I leaned in and got back to work. In the meantime, I finished the first few drafts on the second book and started the third. All of that will pay off in spades down the line. And it’s all because I didn’t quit.
Don’t quit. If you have a dream you’ve wanted for years, chase it. Seek it. Strive and work for it with everything you have. If you get to a point where you have put everything you can into your dream and it still isn’t happening, consider moving on. But if you can’t look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that you have done ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING you can to make it a reality, get back to work. It could take two more years. It could take fourteen. It could take the rest of your life. One day, it will be worth it.
Keep going.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG