I find myself clicking into other sites absently looking for something that isn’t there. Writing super-long emails to friends. I don’t have to listen to the mainstream media endlessly explain why I can’t have Bernie Sanders for my candidate, or how we Really Don’t Know what will happen at the GOP convention.
We really don’t know!
Two of the five hundred or so people on friends list have interacted with me, having noticed my absence. But that’s it, after a month.
My word count goals are still a hit or miss thing. Many variables.
How many hours a day was I on FB? For how long?
Say 1.5-2 hours a day for… 4 years? Five years?
(fumbles with calculator… subtracts the week a year fast…
120 days, 24 hour days… call it 200 days, with sleep and going to bathroom and such.
I’ve compiled lists of people to try to stay in touch with in some other way.
I’m trying to pare myself back to something essential, to focus on what I have to do. I have to try to be better than I am. Stretch.
There’s a kind of sadness I call trying to be taller, where you just flail at these impossible to change things about yourself.
I felt like a lot of my striving as a writer was turning into that, but now, I think, maybe I can…
…myelinate.
The takeaway: practicing skills over time causes those neural pathways to work better in unison via myelination. To improve your performance, you need to practice FREQUENTLY, and get lots of feedback so you practice CORRECTLY and enhance the right things.
I want to make a fucking t-shirt with the word myelinate on it.
I could look back, and tell you, how long it’s been. I think a month, since I bathed in my Facebook feed.
Oh, my feed. My lovely, lovely feed.
Full of political outrage. Full of funny photos of baby animals. I haven’t seen a baby animal in a month. Full of the bits and bites of the lives of authors that are important to me. Michael Swanwick’s breakfast. David Gerrold’s latest six thousand words of effortless, sinuous conversational typing, in which he makes heartfelt points with which I always agree.
My political centrist friends will be arching their eyebrows, gently, at my social justice warrior friends, who greatly outnumber them. Sometimes the centrists are saying stupid things without knowing it. Sometimes they know, and just don’t care, that they’re being slightly dickish
And sometimes, they’re just kinda… right. Um.
Berniebots and $hillary fans are doubtlessly facing off against each other. I voted for Bernie, gave him some money, and I’ll vote for Clinton against whatever horror the GOP conjures up in November. Let it go. Let it go.
I’m writing this note, and letting a plug-in gently slip it back into the abandoned shell of my old social media life, to let whoever remembers me, in Zuckerberg’s arc, know that I made my word count today.
2000 of them, baby.
Now the struggle will be, I know, to wind down. To get ready to sleep; to slow my thoughts so that my brain works tomorrow. To obey the circadian rhythms laid down in millions of years of primordial hunter-gatherer noodling about.
To NOT blast blue light into my retinas, stay up all night and all day by electric light. To not work for 48, 72 hours and then collapse sick for a week afterwards.
The data shows, the tortoises win. Four hours a day, creative work, max, or your’e just running down your machine. Blunting your mental scalpel.
Facebook. How I loved you. But I don’t think I’m coming back any time soon.
There are closed communities of writers; SFWA, indy writers on RRedit, people from whom I can learn, people to whom my chatter might matter and make more sense. I’ll move my social media party there.
I’ll let you know what I’m doing here; as I sink into the abyss of Facebook’s algorithmic afterlife, doubtlessly my posts will be deprecated; you won’t see my blog posts in your feed anymore. Not enough people will see them to like them or like them to see them or whatever, I won’t be making Mark Zuckerberg six cents a day with my 4-6 hours of gratis eyeball glue, so I don’t expect he’ll want to, you know, throw any traffic back at my little frozen banana stand.
That’s not how you get to be a billionaire. You don’t reward the quitters.
Someday, if I’m lucky, you’ll see a book with my name on it, or see an ad or a review for one, and you can buy it, and you’ll feel good about my absence.
Until then,
I bid you peace.
(Channeling an old PBS chef, who had an intern problem and then dropped dead. People in their 50s will remember him. Google it. Sad stuff.)
A quick recap: In order to boost the quantity and quality of my writing I have been following and adapting a series of recommendations culled from Cal Newport’s book Deep Work.
I finished an on-spec article for the SFWA Bulletin (The Science Fiction Writers professional association) on my experiences to date working with Cal’s ideas, adding my own spin to them by dragging in KKR and DWS and their Race idea as a metric to use in a scoreboard which I keep in front of me all the time.
Because people who keep score play differently from those that don’t.
Being an SF writer, I had to discuss science fiction’s relationship to network culture, and the technophile’s enhanced vulnerability to the bleeding edge. I’ll let you know if the piece sells.
One of the rules I’ve created for my new regime is called:
NO BLOG BEFORE FROG
Which is to say, I can’t write blog posts (or do any social media beyond an every other hour message check) before my 1800 new words of the day are written.
The word frog here refers to the motivational trope about ‘eating the frog,’ which means basically that if you have something you need to do, that you don’t do enough, you prioritize that thing, do it first.
This is related to the idea that humans have limited willpower. A lot of life is prioritizing your to-do list, because, simply, you never get to most of your to-do list, do you?
In and around the demands of my client work, this has meant no blogging for a bit. Since I haven’t actually been hitting my word count, either.
Finally, I made my word count, and can post this update… and… well. I find the urge to blog reduced. Life is also about habits. Good ones and bad ones.
In general, I find myself more contemplative, more lonely, feeling slightly cast-adrift, without social media. Not sure what I’ll do when my month is up. A few weeks in I still can’t tell exactly what my abstention is doing to my word count because I had a flurry of client work on deadline eating up the time I was freeing up.
Just a quick note, to the writers out there who read this blog, about the pain of rejection, which is one of those things that all successful writers mention in passing, but of course, being successful writers, we all know, that this is just the beginning of the story. Hearing about how your favorite writer was rejected early on is fun.
It’s refreshing. It’s inspiring.
It suggests that a time may come when rejection hurts less. Or when there is much less of it.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it will be true for me, not a successful writer but a writer who has now had enough success to think that true success might one day be possible. But it’s not true yet.
And a friend of mine related a bit from James Patrick Kelly, a long-time favorite SF short fiction author of mine, about how the rejection never ends, it just changes its tune.
First, your story is rejected with a form.
It’s rejected with a nice note.
It’s rejected with a rewrite request. Then the rewrite is rejected.
The story is published! Nobody reviews it. Nobody seems to read it.
The story is published! It gets bad reviews.
The story is published! Some good reviews! A few people admit to having read it! Award time comes…. crickets.
Award time comes, a few recommendations. (I am here; the rest, from here on out, is hearsay and speculation, based on the second hand reports of the Jim Kelly bit.)
Award time comes, you made the ballot! Now you lose the award.
You’re on the ballot. You lose. Again. And again. And again. (It’s a honor to be nominated! You get to to go to the Hugo Losers party!)
You’re on the ballot. You win. You still can’t sell your novel.
You sell your novel to a publisher! (repeat above, ending with, the book doesn’t earn out. Your publisher says no to the half finished sequel.)
You regularly sell novels. Which never make a bestseller list; you limp along, able to keep publishing, knowing you will never be Neil Gaiman or George Martin.
You become Neil Gaiman and George Martin.
You know you’ll never be J.R.R Tolkien.
It’s rejection, forever and ever and ever.
Still want to write?
In that case maybe, just maybe, you’re a writer. With the capital W. Or the lower case.
Best wishes, then, to you, and me, and the rest of us.
Even poor Gaiman and GRRM. Who my heart goes out to, now, knowing what I know, fifteen rungs down the ladder.
###
Even I have refused to talk about what I said this post was about, which was the pain of rejection; to clarify; on rejection, you will hate your story; you may hate yourself for writing it; you may hate yourself for submitting it; you may think that there were edits that could have saved it that you know now, in hindsight, you should have made; you may think the story is entirely worthless. You may think that you are entirely worthless. Your friends will remind you that you are not the work. You will want to punch these friends in the fucking face for saying you are not the work. If you aren’t the work what are you? If the work isn’t you, what is it? You not being the work is every bit as bad as the work being rejected, thank you very much. You.
Smart friends will say that this is part of the process. You’ll want to punch them, too.
So, with all respect to Cal Newport, whose book Deep Work I’ve been trying to use as a guide, when he says:
Quit social media for a month—
—and then fails to mention the profound sense of dislocation, alienation, and physical withdrawal symptoms this may cause…
Well. Damn Cal. Damn.
Cal is a hard-working, no-nonsense, straight-edged dude. He wasn’t part of the ‘me’ decade, doesn’t remember in his bones the mantra, ‘if it feels good, do it.’ Also, not a science fiction writer, he doesn’t understand the utopian glee with which we plunged headlong into this networked world of the future pretty sure, like the hyped-up masses of the Arab spring, that the promised land was just around the corner.
We infected ourselves with the future on purpose.
We thought google-glass might be a good idea.
Science-fiction is, has been, a kind of half-assed thought experiment about technology and the future disguised, sometimes barely, as entertainment.
Often, SF isn’t so much extrapolation as it is allegory, (saith William Gibson; SF is more about the present than the future.)
The SF writer, confronted with the data on the deleterious effects of network culture on deep work, on concentration, on work-life balance, experiences painful cognitive dissonance. We are just the latest in a long series of revolutionaries becoming counter revolutionaries. Believers becoming skeptics.
To those of you on this journey with me, I say, be careful with this stuff. Newport also points to data suggesting that attention itself is a kind of muscle, that focus is a skill developed over time, and that abrupt efforts to shift away from the kaleidoscope of network culture are often meet with frustration.
Well. Color me frustrated. My productivity isn’t up. Yet. I’ve moved from network heroin to network metadone; this blog, and the handful of readers I can see 24 hours later in analytics; netflixed TV shows instead of snippets of web video, the hilights and GIFS in my feed. Twenty three minute hunks instead of 2 or 3 minute IV drips.
Supposedly, I’m detoxing, even with these small steps. I’ve stopped putting the infoverse through the social media juicer and pureeing it into mind-melting info-slop.
I’m using my mental teeth again. Moving away from baby food.
Tomorrow I will do a 30 minute show on CCTV, our local cable access show, which will probably just recap what I’m blogging but who knows; there’s no script. And I’ll be face to face with a human in a storefront on mass ave.
The stress of leaving the 24-hour party that is, or was, my feed, induced a variety of symptoms. Medical symptoms. A perpetual throat-clearing tic got worse; panic and anxiety responses tamped down with meditation popped up again. Am I certain the fast caused these things? Not really, there’s no ‘control Jay’ who didn’t go off FB that I can compare my life to, but it seems to me that they’re related.
FB bolstered the illusion of my being a professional writer; created this constant background bubble of voices and support. I could write something, an essay, a political screed, a joke, and within minutes have dozens or hundreds of people participating in the conversation.
FB was part of my professional identity as a writer.
The problem is, FB isn’t writing.
And a profession is something you make a living at.
I wish I could say that I’ve written a ton of fiction in the last week, but instead I’ve done production work for design clients and gone to the doctors and done stupid things to sooth and relax myself in place of FB. I had a huge backlog of production and design work, neglected while writing, that was going to get me eventually. I’m in the thick of it.
I recently have tried to re-learn how to read a newspaper. For years now my news has beeen embedded in my feed, and stuff branching off that. Without my feed, I find myself scanning the front page of new sites, wondering what I want to read, what I really care about, as opposed to what FBs algo’s think I care about.
I am pulling away from politics. Pulling away from debate around contentious issues.
That feels…. good?
A friend once told me that the strength of an organism can be measured by the quantity and robustness of its parasites. is it possible that FB is a kind of symptom of a version of me that works better than I’m working now? Even though it is obviously a huge time suck?
A graph of this blog’s hits. How many hits? Not enough to matter!
Day 5 of my Social Media Fast.
So, this article isn’t about indypub, or ‘self-publishing’ as it is referred to generally by people who dislike it, vs traditional publishing, or trad, as it is called by people who generally dislike it.
It isn’t about how useful social media can be for selling books. Google up those articles if you want; there are forty kabillion of them. Yes. A billion twitter followers are handy for selling books. Who knew.
This is about how social media, your blog, your brand, your twitter, only matter after your writing is worth giving two shits about.
Because chances are, it isn’t, and working on the thing itself, your actual work, is much more important than conversational typing and twitter-sized Dorothy Parkerisms.
I mean, if you are good at that kind of thing, if your social media presence just grows and grows organically, if your conversational typing gets tweeted and retweeted and blows up and goes viral, then, Jesus, good for you. That could be useful for marketing a book. A good book. A great book.
After you write one.
Mostly, though, social media is about scratching the itch, the itch to write and be read, the itch to matter to other people, the desire to a part of people’s lives, through writing.
And it is totally the wrong way to go about doing this.
It’s like being an insecure person who has sex with strangers for friendship and respect, who finds they get neither.
How do I know this?
Because I have wasted literally decades of my life with conversational typing; I did it before the web was invented, on USENET. I did it before blogging software was invented, when I published op-ed with a piece of software I bought and paid for, a CMS called Article Manager.
I did it with podcasts, before they were called podcasts, recording audio files of stories I gave away on usenet. I did it with actual podcasts, too. I did it with yahoo-groups. I did it with email lists. I did it with regular old email to small groups of friends.
I did it with blogs. I did it with Facebook.
I like writing. I like having people read what I write. I like instant gratification. Who doesn’t?
I’m doing it right now.
So let me say it, right here, right now, this isn’t the thing itself. The thing I should do is write fiction. This is bullshit I do when I’m not writing fiction. This is bullshit I’ve done much too much of!
How much should I do of this, to support the fiction writing? I don’t know because honestly, a dozen pro sales in, my career hasn’t even fucking started yet.
The only thing I know for sure, is I need a lot more stories, and a lot less conversational typing.
I have to learn how to control the urge for instant gratification. I can write an essay and share it with my 500 FB friends and get 10, or 20, or 30 likes and a dozen shares, and a few hundred views in a period of hours.
Or I can I can write and workshop a short story; spend a year marketing it, wait a year for it to appear in print or on the web and be paid, and get… a few people who review it and send me ‘likes’ in the form of fan mail.
Is it any wonder that people find themselves so seduced by the former that they seldom get around to getting good enough to matter with the latter?
Facebook is a cigarette. Facebook is a bottle of booze. Facebook is sad drunken sexual encounter you will be ashamed of tomorrow. Facebook is a huge bag of Doritos eaten in a single sitting; a liter of soda guzzled triggering explosive belches and farting. Facebook is a binge-watched sitcom on Netflix. One you watched on network TV when you were a kid. Facebook wants you, it wants all of you, all the time, it loves you, even when you’re not lovable, it tells you you matter, even when you don’t.
Facebook is a fake economy, which you enter with a magic printing press that prints money in the form of likes, and you can like as much as you like, and the more you like the greater the chance that someone will like your stuff too.
Facebook is like the gambling games for kids they have at Chuckee Cheeses, where you plunk in tokens, like a slot machine, into a skill-free activity which pumps out tickets, which you use to buy useless crap at a 1000 percent markup.
Social media is party that never ends, a bar that never closes. It is the glint of love in the eye of a stranger, even if it’s only Sveltlana, who wants to get to you know you, because she likes your profile pic.
She likes balding portly middle aged men.
Apparently.
And of course, Svetlana isn’t real.
But then, neither is social media. Not by itself, anyway.
I’m on day 4 of my Facebook Fast. I clicked into my page briefly to grab a bit of info I needed for a job, and said Happy Birthday on a friend’s wall (an actual meat-space person I knew.) but essentially, it’s been 4 days. I’ve gone this long before on vacation. But never without something to distract me.
I did not think it would be this hard; that it would be this bad.
Yesterday, all day, my head itched as if I was infested with lice. That ended with the heart-pounding panic attack that kept me up half the night.
Yeah. Seriously. I’m jonesing.
But reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work, I felt like I had to give it a shot. This social media fast part of his prescription for leveling up in your chosen field. Take a month off. See who notices. See what you miss. See what you gain.
And do your own math on what FB is really worth to you.
The sugenius in me, the utopian reader of Haykim Bey’s TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) Balk’s at some of Newport’s worldview.
Cal’s… a square.
In his world there is a sharp bright line, between work and play, between on-task, and off task, between that which creates value—which he seems to think is well-identified by monetary reward—and that which is trivial, shallow, unimportant.
His books are based on studying the productive rich and famous, and when he discovers the occasional billionaire who doesn’t pursue a fastidious mental hygiene, he makes excuses for them.
Surely, they create value. To be rich is to be smart.
But Newport zeroes in like a kamikaze on the social media products of many billionaires which are designed to vacuum up every scrap of our time and attention. To grab us and hold us and never let us go, to suck us away from meat space, from work, from family, to make every other thing in our lives an interruption of the primary task.
Social media.
In the same way food scientists craft junk-food to be insanely delicious, converting industrial farming surplus into large scale obesity and diabetes for profit, FB and YouTube and Twitter colonize your mind; skinning the infoverse with a bubbling froth of meta-tags and pointers and chatter which harvests value, without of course, investing so much as a penny in the ‘content’ bubbling under that skin.
(Actually, YouTube pays its content authors something; it is probably the least evil of these services. Thanks OGoogle.)
For the rest of these guys, ever and for always, content is free to those that own the biggest network.
Having a lovable, genius square like Newport shine his rational light on my social media habit was roughly the equivalent of waking up to discover I’d sold my children to pedophiles for drug money.
TL: DR, except you just did:
FB is not your friend.
Youtube is not your friend.
Twitter is not your friend
Instagram is not your friend
Dating Ap is not your friend (I’m old. I guess if it works… eh.)
Even email, lovable old email, is not your friend
Anything that you use to stave off boredom in quick reflexive jerks, every time and in every moment the world stops being fascinating, is a crutch with which you weaken your attention, your will, and your precious bodily fluids.
Or so Cal says, and so some, ah, actual research, suggests.
So here I am. Day four. I wonder if anybody notices I’ve left the party?
If you’ve missed me leave a note.
Cal has told me, nobody is going to care.
The next person in the circle jerk just scoots in an little closer and starts stroking.
NOTE: If you are reading this on Facebook, be aware that I have a plug-in that feeds my blog into my author page, for all six people that look at my author page. So. Don’t take the fact that you’re seeing this make you think I am currently basking in FBs glorious, seductive babble of crafted info-bits.
Cuz I’m not. I’m standing out in the the rain rubbing two sticks together. Wood sticks. Forget that circle jerk metaphor.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
I’m gonna be Superman in twenty six more days, or I’m going find Mr. Newport and give him noogie.
This is just being used as an illustration of how stupid I am. It’s also a great album; do some google-fu and find free Firesigh Theatre Youtube content, and then buy a laugh.com CD re-issue. You’ll be happy. You’re welcome.
I’ve been writing fiction on and off, mostly off, for twenty something years.
I completed the prestigious six-week, fiction writing workshop Clarion West in the 90s, after selling a handful of stories to smaller professional-paying national magazines.
In the last three years I’ve sold a dozen pieces to some of the biggest magazines in the field, including nine pieces to Asimov’s SF and two to F&SF, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
So, brief moment of elation, Yay! Got that over with. Now, on to the informative self-loathing.
So, if you want, go listen to that now and come back.
This led me to buy a copy of Cal’s latest book, Deep Work for my Kindle. There were fifty-two holds for it in the Cambridge Library Minuteman Network, and after listening to the podcast I was all hopped-up and giddy so I spent the fifteen bucks. Yes. Fifteen bucks.
So I’m working my way through it. It’s not hard to read, the prose is easy going; what’s hard about it is the title of this article, this understanding that I have been doing this writing thing pretty much all wrong forever, so reading the book I am forced to stop and cry periodically. (And my consciousness, quite honestly, is fragmented by decades of network culture. More on that later. If I remember.)
Rather than paraphrase Cal, I’ll invert his messages, in keeping with my title, and my general spirit of wrong-headedness, so you’ll know what not to do.
These are the George Castanza writing impulses. You feel them. But do the opposite.
Write in short bursts, at infrequent, irregular intervals.
Write in an environment filled with distraction.
Write last. You have other stuff that is more important to do. Remember, your will power is infinite.
Don’t finish what you write. Keep starting new things. Ruminate on the things you have started. But don’t finish them. Ruminate on them for years.
If it is uncomfortable, at all, as you reach or stretch yourself, stop immediately. You could pull a brain muscle. And then where would you be, eh? Say, you notice you write 500 words and then you come up for air, and this is a pattern. Don’t push it. Don’t push your face back down into it. Just marvel at your 500 words. That’s twice what Hemmingway averaged a day. So you’re twice as good as him. Fire up Neflix, Twitter, Facebook, eat a tube of Pringles and drink a liter of Ginger Ale. You earned it.
Do not study the work habits of your heroes, or other successful people. You are unique. Your success is assured. as long as you are true to yourself.
If you want to make a change in your work patterns, set a very very stringent goal, and immediately hold yourself to it. As we know, this is how athletes are made. One day, you simply get up, and you run a marathon, shedding a hundred pounds in an afternoon, and you’re ready for the olympics. A period of sustained effort, reflection, trial and error, isn’t necessary. Your intent is all that matters.
With any effort to modify your process, avoid metrics. Don’t keep score. Use your own seat of the pants gut feeling about how your changes are working out.
In all seriousness, what Cal has to say about the effects of network culture on our ability to do hard things, to sustain effort, is horrifying. He summarizes many studies and books which I have been avoiding reading for years on these things. Which is great. You don’t have to read them. Cal did. He tells you about them.
The news isn’t good. But you knew that.
Cal venerates the wealthy more than I do, and he tiptoes around the examples of CEOs who are jacked into the matrix 24/7; while I’m willing to push Cal’s thesis even there—these people are probably just assholes riding some wave of good fortune and ruthlessness and the sweat of others—Cal makes excuses for them, as they must be, as we say in business, creating value. To earn so much money.
Sure. Got it.
He posits a ‘journalist’s style’ of Deep Focus, which some can cultivate through long practice, which permits a worklife heavily punctuated with interruption and distraction, but for most of us, Cal has a stoic’s message, which is mostly what you were afraid it was going to be. Here goes.
For those not wanting to invert the bullets above, I’ll just say it straight.
Periods of long, intense, uninterrupted sustained effort are needed to cause the metabolic changes that make you better at something. (Nerve myelination is referenced in the book, the process whereby heavily used neurons insulate themselves and become faster firing)
Distraction is distracting; at a deeper level, distraction produces _lingering deficits in cognition_ with every unfinished task in your inbox sucking away at your minds precious bodily fluids.
Social media is stupid and smart people avoid it, if not always, then at least for set-aside periods of time to get shit done. He gives many examples. Oh. So many.
There’s more, but that should be enough for now, to get you started on your own miserable inventory.
The good news? Cal is a positive guy, so his good news is that you realizing that business culture took a serious wrong turn and is now pushing idiotic, counterproductive stuff lets you get ahead, by figuring out how to wall off bits of time and focus for you to get your awesome on.
What dumb stuff is fashionable and bad, you ask? Open office plans; constant meetings and constant interruption; being forced to use social media, are all examples of mindless business fetish.
Oh, other good news is that all the stuff that business is wrongly focused on? Using easy-to-use social media tools? Churning out emails and attending meetings? Everything dumb? OK, AI is going to be doing more and more of the dumb stuff anyway. So Deep Work becomes more and more important, because by definition, it’s what can’t be automated.
So go Deep, and you stand a better chance of not being turned into Soylent Green by our new AI overlords, or the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump or whoever.
Whew! So. What’s next for me?
Figuring out how to put some of the horrible truth into practice.
He says, as he blogs. But. I’m focused here longer than I am on an FB post. So.
A few days back I received emailed galleys for my upcoming novella, What we Hold Onto, which should appear in the late spring, in the June issue of Asimov’s.
Again, I experience a weird mixture of triumph and terror. Gut wrenching fear.
What if people hate it?
The POV character is female, a middle aged woman. What if they say she doesn’t feel female?
I’ve made up a new human culture. What if people say it’s total bullshit? I use the made-up culture to explore some ideas in and around race. What if people say I’m whitesplaining, mansplaining?
Even worse, what if people think it’s boring?
What if it makes people cancel their subscriptions and I never sell another story?
Everything I’m proud of in the twenty three thousand word thing, every revelation, every thing that came alive on the page as I wrote it now looks like a dissected frog in the galley. Yup. Those are the organs. That’s a heart. That’s a stomach. That’s a, a… liver, I think. Uh huh. That’s a frog all right. I think.
I’ve been through his ten times now, in the big magazines.
Some part of me will love this thing again, in the future, I know. But not now.
And as I anticipate failure, some part of me wonders, what if it was nominated for an award and I felt like I’d finally, once and for all, arrived? What if I felt perfectly welcomed and accepted and loved by all of science fiction? What if my Clarion instructors read it, and sent me notes, on a job well done?
What if it got me a thousand twitter followers?
What if it made attractive people want to be my friend?
Would that change the nature of the blank page in front of me when I write? Would that blank page feel any better?
Would that page beckon any more brightly?
Knowing what I know, about myself, having got this far, what do I think, really?
That’s right.
I hear a voice which says, soothing, ‘just do your work, just do your work, just do your work.’
This is as good as it gets. It doesn’t have to get better.
Just a quick note, to the writers out there who read this blog, about the pain of rejection, which is one of those things that all successful writers mention in passing, but of course, being successful writers, we all know, that this is just the beginning of the story. Hearing about how your favorite writer was rejected early on is fun.
For those not wanting to invert the bullets above, I’ll just say it straight.