Thirty-five weeks after the first day of the second new year

Happy September to you all! The summer holidays are over, fall (or spring, if that’s where you live) is hopefully around the corner, so temperatures might temper down (or, well, up) a bit. Personally, I need the summer to take a vacation somewhere that’s not here. It’s hot here and it’s humid and the air isn’t moving, so you get where the sentiment comes from. On the positive side, my car has been repaired and I can actually steer it now, so that’s good (yeah, you’re not mistaken, that’s sarcasm there).

It’s been an extremely busy week, busy with so many things that Kate and I had to take care of that were not at all related to work. No, not bad things (excluding that thing with the car, of course), just things that piled up and needed to be taken care of. But no matter how busy we were, the work related to Author & Sister and to our books still needed to be done, and in this busy week, too, it didn’t stop. At this point in the work, with published books and an extensive author platform that needs Kate’s constant attention, and a new book on the way that needs mine, there’s no time to stop. This isn’t the beginning, this is work that is well into an established plan that needs to keep rolling.
The new book, my next book for you, is certainly demanding its due attention, I can tell you that. It’s in one of the more advanced steps now, a thorough review. The next step is the critical one, it’s the one where I’ll need to decide if I’ve reached that “Yes, that’s it” feeling I told you about that I look for with every book, the feeling that the story is exactly what I want it to be. Since this isn’t an Oracle series book, but an entirely different type of suspense novel—romantic suspense is what Kate says it is—and since it will potentially start a new series, getting to that “Yes, that’s it” feeling is as painstaking and as important as it was with Oracle’s Hunt, the first book in the Oracle series. I’ll let you know how that goes, of course, as promised, and I’ll also tell you when I begin to prepare this new book for publication.

Note that I’m not giving you a publication date here, not even an approximate one, just like I haven’t done with any of my previous books, simply because I can never know what will happen. No one can. You should always have an idea, a good one even, of when you intend to finish your book and to publish it, but obviously life happens on the way, and even plans that are based on extensive past experience can change. It never feels good when that happens, but it’s something you learn to accept and compensate for.

The thing is, once you’ve decided on becoming an author, or on any other dream of yours you wish to fulfill, and if you have the conviction that you can succeed, then you need to continue regardless of any difficulties you encounter. Think about it—many of these difficulties would still be there if you were doing something else instead of following your dream. At least this way you’re doing something you love and believe in, something for yourself, something, if you think about it, for the people you love, too.

No one promised you an easy path to fulfilling your dreams. What you can be sure of is that if you do what it takes and have what it takes you will have a fair chance at succeeding, and it is up to you to take that chance as far as it can possibly get. I have said it before and I will say it again: no matter how difficult things become, don’t stop and don’t give up. You will fall. Get up and press on. You will fail. Get over it and try again. Scream, cry, vent your anger and disappointment, indulge in something comforting. Do what you need to do, just so long as you take the next step toward the goals you’ve set for yourself, toward what for you is the coveted horizon.

Originally published on www.authorandsister.net/blog/how-to-s...