Wednesday, September 14, 2011

On Falling Down and Getting Up

This month I'm coming back from a real poor couple of months writingwise.  I didn't get a lot of new words written, and barely sent out anything to publishers.  While I did upload my first ever short story collection ("Decisions, Decisions") I didn't do much with epublishing either.

There were a lot of reasons for this, some of them personal.  The bottom line is, when it came to my writing career, the past couple of months were not good.  I blew it.  Period.  End of story.

The question at the end of August was: What do I do now?

I could, of course, have let the inertia I'd built up continue.  I could have quit writing altogether, decided the dream wasn't for me, and gone on to consider a career in video gaming.

I could have beaten myself up over the fact that I blew it this summer.  Told myself I wasn't going to cut it. 

I could have had a pity party about poor me and felt sorry for myself.

I did beat myself up some about not writing.  I'm a writer.  I should be writing.  And there was a short pity party to go along with it.

But mainly I decided to try to make September different.

This meant getting back to work.  So far, that has meant focusing on the writing, even though I know things need to be sent out and uploaded.  I plan to get back on track for those things as well, but the important thing for me at the beginning was getting back into the habit of daily producing new words of fiction.

I've slipped up 3 days this month so far.  But I'm working on getting my daily groove back.  It helps that I am working on a new project with a fellow writer that I am enjoying.

And I remember what Kristine Kathryn Rusch says, "It doesn't matter how many times you get knocked down, or how long you stay on the floor.  What matters is you get up again."

That's what I did.  I got to my feet, dusted myself off, and started walking the writer's road again. 

There's no guarantee I won't fall down again.  But when that happens, I plan on getting up - again.  It's the only way to keep doing what I love.

Maybe you're working on a dream, and you've fallen down on it.  Maybe you're lying on the floor like I was, wondering what to do now.  If you aren't, at some point you probably will.  And if you're like me, you'll do it more than once.

Get up.  Get back on track.  Don't give up.  Falling down isn't failure.  Staying down is.