in search of the hat trick...

"there's nothing to writing. all you do is sit down at a typewriter, open a vein and bleed..." (red smith)

on sunday i finally finished book 2 of the series.

let me just tell you, friends, this book was so difficult to finish. so. freakin'. hard.

i lost faith in it about midway through, especially when it was about time to start all the major action and conflict resolution-y stuff.

but with a little help (and gentle nudges) from a couple really good friends, i somehow managed to limp along to the end. (hooray!)

in the old days, that would have been the end of it. agonize a little in the process of writing the book, whine a little, and then be done with the damn thing.

a long, long time ago...the really hard part of this writing thing was getting past chapter 3.

i mean it.

you'd have a great idea to start yourself out with and you'd go for it.  (i am sooo good at the "go for it part"!)

And then  somewhere around page 30 or 40, you'd start to realize that you didn't really plan this charade out all that great and you (and by that I mean "I") abandon ship. cannoooonball!

my guess is you'd probably blink a few times in surprise if i told you how many false starts live in my computer's cloud. (that sounded funny, didn't it? there's also that perpetual cloud my brain lives in and there are millions more false starts there, too.)

but somewhere along the way, in the past two years, i figured out how to end a book. hoooray, right?!

in the past two years i've actually had the chance to write "the end" on four projects (two of them attached to my YA series and two are in the romance/smoochy-smoochy genre).

and since i figured out how to type "the end," the panic no longer happens at page 30 or 40. it happens that next morning after you finish your book. (for the record, i only finish books at night. strange, right?)

these days, i want to unsend my book to my editors. i don't want anyone to read it and i wish i'd never said anything about being a writer at all.

i worst-case-scenario myself all to hell and convince myself that in a world of millions upon millions of traditionally and indie published books out there, mine will never really reach anybody, so why bother?

it's ugly. but mostly it shows me it's probably part of a maturing process as a writer (not a human being--i've given up hope on ever encountering one of those).

maybe the next phase is that i panic when a NY publisher wants to hand me a chunky little advance check. and then after that, i'll panic when i'm not sure if i want the red private jet or the gold one...

baby steps, i get it...i get it...

but for this moment right here...i mostly need to stuff those awful things i tell myself and march on. i've got another book to complete to round out before i can really wallow in how scary this publishing journey is and how i'm just not cut out for it.

kidding. kind of....