Thursday, August 24, 2006
Nerves of Steel--Not!
In September, I'm teaching my first online course ever, for my local RWA chapter. The course is called "Never Give Up--The Stubborn Person's Road to Publication." In it, I'm going to try to give struggling writers tips on how to stay in the game for the long haul.
I'm excited to do it, because I'd love to help motivate people who are in the throes of frustration, as I was for many years. But it's also a scary prospect because I've never done anything like this before. It's amazing how intimidating that first time can be--even though I'm confident I know my material and know intellectually that I can handle it. It's just that I can't reach back into any well of experience to tell myself "You've done this before, you can do it again." (If anyone's interested in signing up for this class, you can find more details here.)
Of course, I've also never had a book commercially published before, so (as you know if you've been reading my posts lately) I'm one big raw nerve right now anyway. October 31st (the official release date for Watchers in the Night) can't come soon enough!
To make matters worse, my agent will also be shopping my urban fantasy novel. I've sold four books now. You'd think that would mean I'd be calm, cool, and collected about this whole submission process, right? Nope! The submission process still makes me anxious, especially now that I'm submitting in a second genre. I also really, really love this book, and I really hope it sells. (My agent doesn't seem to worried about that--it's wonderful to have someone have so much confidence in me--but after so many rejections on my road to publication, I can't help my pessimistic tendencies.)
So, any writers out there who think everything will suddenly become easy once you sell--I hate to disillusion you, but it just plain doesn't. And I'm very thankful that there are a whole lot of published authors in my local RWA chapter who were able to warn me of this phenomenon in advance. I think if it weren't for them, I'd have been really shocked to find myself in this state. It's good to know I'm not the only one.
posted by Jenna Black @ 8:42 AM
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4 Comments:
Even so, I'm definitely looking forward to those Published Author Nerves. ;-) Congrats on all your success recently! Can't wait to read Watchers, but you knew that already. Heehee.
Oh, believe me, I'm not complaining. I'm going to suffer from Neurotic Writer Syndrome whether my books sell or not. It's definitely better to suffer from it when selling. LOL
good luck with your book. I live in England (soon to be in Amsterdam) - how could I get my hands on a copy of your book?
Perhaps you can order it through Amazon.com? I'm under the impression that you can order from them from any country, as long as you have a credit card, but I could be wrong. Other than that, I don't know. Maybe another commenter will have more experience with this than I and can chime in.
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