Tag: make it happen

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How to make it as an author

Hi, guys!

Not only is it a new year, it’s a new decade. (Sick of hearing that yet?) Let’s start this shit off right.

Everyone has dreams. Or at least, everyone should.

But so many people give up on their dreams or spend more time fantasizing about the dream come true aspect than they do actually working for it.

Humans love short cuts and easy little tricks to cut the work load in half. We love the idea of things just happening for us even better.

But.

(Yeah, I know, I’m a terrible person for this next part.)

That isn’t how it works.

Not unless you’re in the 1%.

For the vast majority, making your dreams come true takes time and effort. It takes work.

That’s it.

That’s the big secret, the little trick.

Effort.

Actually. Fucking. Trying.

Some parts will be easier than others, of course. Some parts will be so hard that you want to smash something to bits.

But you still have to put in the time to get to the “dream come true” part.

Now, I’m not 100% there yet. I’m not living my dream, and I admit that freely.

But I intend to, at some point.

As such, even with family visiting for the past couple weeks and the stress/busy nature of the holidays, I’ve still spent time on my books.

I’ve made it through a third of the final round of edits of World for the Broken and put together promotional materials. I did promo stuff for The Gem of Meruna and rereleased it. I even managed roughly 3,500 words (idk exactly, I don’t remember what my word count was a couple weeks ago) on my new WIP and started working on a cover. I know that’s not a lot of words over two weeks, but alongside all the stuff for my other projects, it’s decent.

Basically, even through the holidays, an author’s work never sleeps. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love the worlds I’ve built for these stories and want to share them with you.

That means spending time in those worlds, in the minds of those characters. (Which certainly isn’t a bad thing.)

And eventually, that time and effort (spent doing something I love) will lead me to my dream of being a stay-at-home author. Yes, I’m going to daydream about what it would be like to already be there.

But I’m also going to do the work necessary to get there.

That means that when I want to relax, I explore the worlds of my stories more often than the worlds of the video games I used to sink months’ worth of play time into. When I get off a 12 hour shift on a Sunday night and want to go to bed, I still do my blog. Every week. So that I can post it early Monday morning before I go to sleep.

Your schedule will obviously be different from mine, and you can adjust it as need be. But the effort has to be there.

At some point, you have to stop talking about it, stop daydreaming, and just do. Take a step.

No tricks.

No short cuts.

Because that isn’t how life works.

So please, whatever your dream is, give it the time and effort it deserves. “Life” is not an excuse to set your dreams aside. Your shows will still be there after you do some shit to make your dreams happen. So will the closet you keep telling yourself you’ll clean out, so stop staring at it, thinking of what to do with it just to procrastinate. That won’t help you reach your goals.

Life is always going to happen around you. You just have to make things work.

Because when life steps aside, it’s too late for dreams.

Now, that got a little darker than I expected when I started this blog…but what the hell? That’s pretty normal for anything I write.

In short, don’t fucking slack. DO YOUR SHIT.

K, thanks.

Lol.

Keep reading. Keep writing.

Later. 

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Who do I think I am? An expert?

Hi, guys!

I’m going to get the little accountability portion of this blog out of the way quickly today. I approved final proofs for The Gem of Meruna, making it officially available for pre-order, and designed some book swag for the re-release.

I also made quite a bit of progress toward finishing the 3rd person to 1st person conversion of my post-apocalyptic romance novel, and sufficiently pumped myself up for the next story I’ll be working on. (Thank you playlist made specifically for that story…)

Now…

I had a blog planned for today, and I intended to think through all the avenues I needed to cover in the blog while I was at work.

But now, this blog feels more important than the one I was going to do. (I’ll just do the other one next week.)

My brain has been on some next level anxiety this past week, concocting Truman Show level conspiracy shit. Basically, I’ve been pushing myself lately, and my brain is getting angry.

It’s been picking apart positive feedback from beta readers and twisting good reviews. Certain words, though clearly meant in a positive way, have been stripped of their context and twisted. My brain’s been spiraling.

Imposter syndrome has been saying, “This word? You think that’s good? No, no. This, this terrible, negative other meaning that word has (because English is terrible and words mean many things out of context)…this is what they really meant.”

Anxiety has also been telling me that all my various friends have their own secret group messages created for moments when I’m around, and whenever I do something they don’t like (read: exist near them, physically or in various virtual functions), they venture into those group messages, and say shit like, “Is she fucking serious with this shit? Why is she even here?”

And rationally, I know that’s not the case.

People are far more upfront than anxiety gives them credit for. Sure, duplicitous people exist, but I don’t make a habit of associating with them.

People are also not likely to willingly subject themselves to the company of someone they don’t like just for the sake of making a joke. Unless they’re a stand-up comic. Then it’s material for their job.

But I don’t know anyone who does stand-up.

Rationally, I know that this is just what anxiety and my occasional bouts of depression do to a person. I also know it’s temporary. I’ve been dealing with this crap off and on for most of my life.

And I know I’m not alone in dealing with this. (Hence talking about it here, because other people need to know they’re not alone.)

Now, normally, I feel like I need to come up with something really good for my blogs. It feels like it needs to be important and informative for people to want to bother reading it.

Social media has this way of making us feel like we need to be perfect and polished, like we have to be experts at everything.

When it comes time to write a blog, I tend to pick some tidbit about writing and give advice on it. Sometimes it’s based on mistakes I’ve made in the past or things I’ve learned while researching story structure or flow or character development or whatever. Sometimes it’s a pet peeve that cropped up in a book I’m reading, or maybe it happened in a book I read years ago and it just came screaming back to me.

But it always feels like I need to act like an expert.

I mean, I’m not.

By any means.

Which is always made abundantly clear by the “update” portion of my blog, wherein I basically say I’ve been throwing shit at the wall all week to see what sticks.

Because I’m not an expert.

And I certainly don’t feel like an expert today.

I don’t have a foolproof, airtight plan detailing everything I need to do every day for the rest of the year to make all my dreams come true in the new year. I’m not going to lie to you guys and say that if you do everything I do, follow every step, all your dreams will come true, too.

(If anyone ever says that, approach with caution. Or…just walk away.)

Humans can’t possess that level of perfection. We are flawed creatures by nature. We can plan things, but that doesn’t guarantee the perfect outcome every time.

We get in the way. We make mistakes. Life gets in the way. Shit happens.

I have some plans for what I need to do and some ideas of what I want to try, but I don’t know if they’ll work until I try them.

And that’s part of being human.

So for all the millions of people also battling anxiety and depression and imposter syndrome, here are a few things you need to know.

You’re not alone. (I promise.)

It is temporary.

It’s okay not to be an expert, so long as you keep trying and learning.

It’s okay to take a break if you’ve been pushing yourself too hard, so long as you taking a few hours to relax doesn’t turn into you never getting back on the proverbial horse.

Keep trying even if it’s difficult. Because ultimately, you’re doing this for a reason.

Keep reading. Keep writing.

Later.

Posted on

Dreaming

Hey, guys!

Progress report first.

So, I got like…20 pages edited since my last blog post. :/

But I also got a potential cover for Soul Bearer knocked out, with a second option currently on the works. And I designed some swag for the release!

All of which…believe it or not…took a long ass fucking time. Lol. There’s a reason graphic designers charge as much as they do. It’s hard work, and takes time.

The biggest part of my days off this week was spent driving and/or riding back home from Texas. Thanks to traffic and shitty drive thru wait times, the 15 hour drive turned into 17.5 hours…

So that sucked.

But oh well. I’m back home now, and have my work week behind me. I’ll be able to put in some real editing time this week (hopefully), and get the final potential cover mocked up so I can pick one, and start moving forward there.

Now, the main event…Lol.

Today, I’m sort of continuing last week’s topic, but not really. Last week, I talked about making time to write. This week, I want to talk to you guys about making time for what’s important to you.

Now, I didn’t have the best childhood. I’ve talked about a few of the reasons for that in previous blogs, and I’m not going to rehash them today. That’s not the point here.

The point is that…it screwed me up. A lot.

All the trauma, the social anxiety, the depression, and the crippling OCD combined to make me feel…worthless.

Worse than worthless.

So, I didn’t really have any real dreams for myself. I wanted to be financially stable and have a stable relationship. That was about it.

I did all my school work and got good grades so no one would be concerned about me (because, for whatever reason, good grades equates to good mental health in the eyes of our school systems. To me it meant a way to keep people from asking questions). I followed the rules for the same reason.

I didn’t want anyone’s attention, be it positive (I didn’t feel like I deserved it) or negative (I couldn’t stand the thought of being a bigger disappointment than I already thought I was).

After high school, I went to college because any kid with good grades (or, in my generation, almost any kid) is expected to go. And I couldn’t be a disappointment.

I liked english and art, but I couldn’t bear the thought of having to explain what I would possibly use the degree for. The criticism would be too much.

I also liked psychology. I didn’t realize at the time how much of that was a need to understand myself and my own childhood, but it didn’t matter.

Because no one questions a psych major. No one asks, “What will you possibly use that degree for?” Instead, they say, “Let me know when you’re out of school. I know some people who need to come see you.”

A cheesy laugh follows, and the conversation moves to a different topic.

Basically, it was the perfect major for keeping people happy.

But…then I had some health problems senior year, and the doctors couldn’t figure it out. They were tossing around the big ones…cancer, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis…

And I thought about what I wanted out of life.

And it wasn’t the life of a therapist. I didn’t (still don’t) want to listen to the aftermath of traumatic events, day in and day out. I didn’t want to lie awake in bed wondering if something I said or didn’t say would be the breaking point, the straw that broke the camel’s back…the thing gone wrong that made a client kill themself. I didn’t want to spend every second outside of the office writing up notes on the day’s sessions.

So I didn’t. The doctors found a bunch of little manageable shit, rather than one big problem, and I stopped applying to graduate schools.

Even then, I didn’t dare dream of writing for a living. I just wanted to get a job, marry my then-boyfriend/now-husband, get a house, and live my life.

It took a couple more years of steadily working on myself to realize that…I deserved to have a dream, to have something to work toward.

Even then, I never thought of writing for a living as being attainable. It was just a pipe dream that I thought about occasionally, but didn’t put any faith in.

I thought myself worth having a dream, but not worth attaining it. So I didn’t really…try.

But if you don’t try to attain your dream, it’s guaranteed not to happen. If I never wrote a word, never edited a single page, I wouldn’t just wake up one day, a stay-at-home writer. That isn’t how it works.

But now, I’m trying. I’m working toward it. When I’m at home, I devote chunks of time to writing/editing. When my husband drives us to work, I post to my author pages. When I drive, I post on break. On my other breaks, I work on designs for book merch book or cover ideas. I stay up late to work on my blog, even after getting off of a 12 hour shift in steel toes on concrete floors…

Because I want this.

And I finally feel like…maybe I deserve it. Not because I’m special. But because I’m a person, and people deserve to be happy, and writing makes me happy.

So, anyone reading this, please, just know that you deserve to be happy. You deserve to have a dream, and you deserve to have something to work toward.

Whether it’s writing, or running a kickass book review blog, or becoming a therapist, or working a job that allows you to go home and actually be present at home…Whatever it is, you deserve to do what makes you happy.

You’ll probably have to work for it, especially if it’s writing. This isn’t the easiest field to go into, that’s for sure. (Hence, me keeping my day job indefinitely, because mortgage companies expect to be paid whether you’re living your dream, or not. Lol.)

Now, go out there, and be yourself. Live for you. You’re not going to be happy hiding who you are, or pretending that what you want doesn’t matter as long as everyone else is happy.

There are limits here, obviously. Still pay your bills. I don’t want anyone saying, “I took your advice, and my house got repossessed.” You still have to work to pay your bills. Lmao.

But it’s okay to have a goal beyond that.

Anyway.

Keep reading. Keep writing.

Later.