Perseverance

I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I am not posting from my iPod! YAY! The bad news is that my laptop is completely dead. I've got my desktop computer, and an AWESOME, AMAZING friend gave me an old laptop. Another AWESOME, AMAZING friend's AWESOME, AMAZING husband retrieved everything from my old hard drive, too. I am really, really blessed.

But that isn't what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about sticking it out on this completely crazy road to representation/publication. Not the whole "Publishing takes forever and it takes the average writer ten years to get published" stuff, because as far as I'm concerned, that's just depressing. I mean, I get that, yes, this is hard work, and you have to have patience. But. I think that sometimes we get too caught up in "keeping it real" that we forget to be encouraging.

With that in mind, I'd like to point you to the lovely Tawna Fenske's post about drawer novels. Sure, most published authors have drawer novels (I guess the average is seven?), but that doesn't mean that the novel you're working on RIGHT NOW isn't the one for you, whether it's your sixth or your first. No one can tell you that without reading it (and you definitely need feedback from others, but you already knew that, right?).

And then, the always amazing Maggie Stiefvater posted about the odds of getting published vs. the odds of getting killed by a ham sandwich. It's a brilliant post.

Finally, I am a big fan of So You Think You Can Dance. If you watched last week, ballet dancer Alex got assigned a hip hop routine with one of the best hip hop dancers they've had on the show, Twitch. It should have been a train wreck, or at least mildly uncomfortable to watch. But it wasn't.


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WghpdgPc-24   (Sorry, Embedding is disabled, but it's worth clicking, I promise).

 
If you saw the show, it kind of *was* a train wreck at first (they show some rehearsal footage before each performance). But Alex had PERSEVERANCE. He probably worked on it every spare second he had that week, and it paid off. Big time.

All that to say, don't give up. Like Maggie said, you're probably already ahead of the game – don't quit. You can move on, work on something else, but don't give up. Everyone's path to publication is different, so forge your own.

What do you think? Have you seen any inspiring posts lately? Share with me in the comments!

Larissa