Steady in Your Goals

I made a goal, on this blog, one year ago this last January. If you don't count rewrites, I accomplished that goal by November. If you do, I completed it today. I wrote, rewrote, and polished two novels. One Epic Fantasy and one LDS Contemporary.

I'm going to just come out and say it... Fantasy is grueling to write. Grueling, and perhaps more wonderful than anything else. The LDS contemporary came so much easier and quicker and the rewrites were not nearly so extensive. Of course, it was also about half as long. The grand total: about 290,000 words in eleven months, and then polishing and rewriting in another five.

Man. What a trip it's been :) Two thousand words take me about two and a half hours to write each day. I think it's important and worth it and all that, but I'll feel better about it when it starts giving back to my family. That's where I'm at right now, but I'm not hanging my writing on it. I'm a writer, period. I keep writing. Right now, I have three polished (I believe, wonderful) as-yet-unpublished manuscripts. One of them (LDS historical fiction) failed to find a publisher. I'm setting it on the back burner for now. These two will be in the process of submission for quite a while... several months, even if I get a quick "yes" on my LDS contemporary novel from somebody. And it's possible that both of these will not find publishers as well. They're both kind of outside-the-box. Epic fantasy is hard to sell when you don't have big sales to back up the fact you can sell books. And the LDS novel isn't your typical romance-or-inspirational-fiction... it's kind of complicated.

But right now I can say, these are good books. ANd I know that some day people will read and enjoy them. In the meantime? I try the next idea. I've got quite a few ideas to try. I'll try them all, one after another, and become more and more accomplished at writing, and somebody will want something sometime. The odds of being picked up get better the more you have to offer. It becomes increasingly likely that someone will want something of yours if you continue to produce a variety of quality products.

(I don't like to think of my books as products. That's my marketing brain kicking in. As a writer, though, I have to think like that if I'm ever going to sell anything to anyone.)

I guess, to sum up: goal accomplished. I feel wonderful. In a way, even more wonderful because I've kept going with little encouragement from those I'm selling my books to. That means I'm a writer. That I do it for the creativity, for the love of storytelling.... not for the audience and (ha!) certainly not for the money.

I think that the best way to be lucky, if you need luck, is to keep steady in your goals. To keep working hard. The longer you work hard, the more you do, the more likely it is that someone will notice and appreciate your hard work and decide you're worth taking a chance on.


This week I will be writing summaries, chapter outlines, and query letters. And then I will be submitting, everywhere. Faith is the other part of it. You work hard, and you have faith in yourself, and you put yourself out there.