​                Working on developing a writing project when you are *ahem* bi-vocational (meaning that you love writing and want to write full time but need to also eat and have clean water because apparently your body will shut down without these things?) is a series of fits and starts.
                It’s understanding that being creative requires attention to detail and time and being unwilling to compromise on either… but being unable to give them in unlimited quantities. Reading over a single paragraph ten times to get just the right punctuation, just the right words, just the right ‘feel’ is time consuming. You must choose to either feel good about putting out volume or quality. With other things vying for your attention, you cannot have both.
                It’s understanding that your success is directly connected to your ability to pick yourself up, again and again, when you fall short of your goals. Often, no matter how hard you try, other things get in the way of your writing, and these things NEED to be done. Even when you make it a priority to write, five “important” emails and an unexpected meeting at work can blow up the best of intentions. You need to accept that failure to write, and try again the next day (or the next month).
                It’s understanding that sometimes silence doesn’t mean that you have nothing to say, you just can’t say it right away. You have to hold onto your own value, the fact that what you’re trying to say, the story you’re trying to tell, may be on hold, but that doesn’t mean that it has lost value. You just can’t work on it now. You still have a message.
                I have had a challenging past few months professionally, and that has gotten in the way of my writing. And I mean any writing of any kind - obviously. Now that I’m back in my work-in-progress (dredging through the sequel to ‘Assigned’ to get ready for layout and formatting), I have to constantly remind myself of these things.
                I’m very excited to be getting ready to release ‘Queen’ in the next few months, and I’m enjoying the editing process (probably more on that later). I hope that you’ll enjoy it, too, but, more than that, I hope that somebody who needed to hear that they need to brush the dust off and get back to their dream-lay-dormant will read this.
                Just because you’ve had to wait doesn’t mean you’re done.