A Final Farewell...

It is with great sadness that I bid my final farewell to my Operation Awesome operatives. I am thankful to you all for your many contributions, and teaching me more than I could ever hope for.

In looking back over my past posts, I was reminded of one of my first, Sailing Through Fog: How Writers Can Chart Toward an Unseen Horizon. Yet again, I find myself in unfamiliar waters, navigating a new job and figuring out a new normal.

Fog Photo by Psytrom, courtesy of Photobucket

You'd think, two years after that post, I would have figured out all the bumps by now. But that's not how it works. You dodge a rock you think is there, only to run into a completely new rock on the other side. Then you have to re-chart again, because the reality you perceived wasn't there at all, and your certainty is dragged from your center until it becomes a delusion.

So you get knocked out of the boat maybe, and once you get back in, you're cold, wet, and irritated. But if you're in the right state of mind, you can start to see the new pattern so clearly that it turns into one that's familiar, and slowly, surely, you can sail forward again.

It's something we face time again, in writing, and outside of it. Something you tried didn't turn out the way you planned. Perhaps a book you wrote went off in a completely unexpected direction. Or your query flopped. Or a publishing relationship inexplicably went south. Or a marketing strategy you put a lot of work into tanked, and you're still not sure why.

All of these have one aspect in common: they all represent trials we have to go through in order to fully understand what we need to learn from them. And with that understanding, we're armed with a oar to do it better next time.

Sometimes we have to go through the same thing a lot of times before it finally registers. And that's okay. Even new mistakes are okay--because in them we can see where we've improved, what we've overcome, and what else we can learn.

So I leave all you wonderful readers in the hopes that you'll find as many new paths as possible, and when the river gets bumpy, remember we're are all sailing through this together, toward that unseen, misty horizon.

I'll let the Shakira song from the new Zootopia movie finalize my point:

Affirmation is my Albatross

We all know that writing is a long waiting game, whether you're yet to be agented or published, on submission, or awaiting reviews for your published work.

In these stages, it's common to look for sources of affirmation. I'm lucky to have a group of people who support me when things get challenging, but sometimes, affirmation becomes my albatross. I get so consumed with the external--what people think, and confirmation that I'm doing all right--that it's easy to get desperate when affirmation doesn't come my way.

Unfortunately, this makes me look a bit like John Cleese in the beginning of this Monty Python YouTube clip (language NSFW).



And here are some other reasons why having affirmation as my albatross is a bad idea (the fact that John Cleese has his around his neck is probably no accident):

1. I look desperate. ("Alllbaatrosss!")

2. It's extremely unsatisfying. ("I haven't got any choc ices, I just have this albatross.")

3. Sometimes I get defensive. ("Don't you oppress me, mate!")

3. And at the end of it, I'm still left with a gigantic bird that weighs down my psyche. ("Of course you don't get f*#king wafers with it!")

So here's what I'm going to try. I'm going to look within, and find what matters in my bones, no matter whether the affirmation comes or not. Namely, I'm going to ask myself the following:

1. What are five things I've accomplished?

2. What am I most proud of?

3. What do I value most?

4. What keeps me going when things get tough?

Often, when I answer these, I find I'm further along than I thought. Plus, it helps me keep focused on the writing itself (a great source of internal affirmation). With these tools, I'm optimistic that I can eventually drop my albatross for good.

So what about you? What is your albatross? In what ways does external affirmation (or conversely, disavowal) affect your writing life?