In Pursuit . . . goes to print!!!
Just in time for Katherine Mansfield's birthday.
"I'm treating you as a friend asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future pluses." —Katherine Mansfield
Today Katherine and I shared the "pluses." After all these stressful months, I am about to receive the finished product. Not the heavy stack of manuscript pages or its PDF file or its eBook, but the printed book itself will be in my hands tomorrow. My first opportunity to pull back its beautiful cover and look between the sheets. That’s so seductive, don't you think?
Internet Marketing 101 comes next and I dread it. Long tedious hours pursuing ways to make In Pursuit... visible to readers by promoting my website that is still in constuction. It has taken way longer than I could have ever imagined. I know what you're thinking, "If you don't build it, they won't come." Don't think I don't know that. I think about it all the time.
And the writer? What has she been doing? you ask. Certainly, not writing. Not a word on the blank page until I go on my writers' retreat in January and leave Katherine at home. Until then I will continue to market In Pursuit... and practice my writing on this blog.
No, I can’t develop new characters or write exciting dialog or make scenes for my next novel, but I can keep my fingers supple. It’s not exactly the same as being an active storyteller, which I miss so much, but it’s better than not writing at all.
After I finish today's blog, I am going to make myself a much-deserved Gimlet. Then I am going to lift my glass to all you writers who know the heartbreak when you're not writing. You know that awful feeling when someone asks “What do you do?” and you reply, “I’m a writer,” and then later you question if that is really true when you're not producing any stories.
Wait that is not entirely true. Today I condensed Katherine's 333-page biographical novel into a 500-word summary. That's not easy.
Before I leave you, I'm going to end with a shocker. This is the second time I have written this blog tonight. I don't know what happened. I went and mixed my gimlet and when I returned to my laptop, it was gone. Disappeared, swallowed up into an internet cloud. Let me tell you, I was ready to pack it in. Forget the damn blog. Instead I slammed my studio door shut and sat back down again and rewrote it. That's determination. And I think the revised blog is better.
