Wow, am I ever glad to find this site. I was a member for maybe three minutes when I hopped to "The Dreaded Moment of Suck," by Alison Janssen. About writers/editors’ anxiety. Can I relate to that.
For a long time, I regarded my crumbling self esteem in the face of a completed or in process manuscript as evidence of my Scandinavian ancestry. "We do angst." But apparently it’s an occupational hazard.
I want to share with you the post from my personal blog, http://www.sandranathan.net/?p=175,
that led to the creation of an entirely new blog for writers, http://yourshelflife.com.
I started Your Shelf Life: How Long Will You Last? as a resource for writers in December 2008. At the time, I was agonizing over what to do with my writing carreer. Keep using a micropress or submit to the majors? If I submitted my work to large presses, I faced both the pain of possible rejection and the perils of acceptance. If they accepted my work, would I see it published three years later with a pects and cleavage cover, stripped of its core?
About this time, a friend contacted me. She’d been in some really big life trials, the kinds of things you do not want happening to you. She told me, "When I was going through it, I kept thinking about that article you wrote about the horse show where you kept losing and losing, until you won the grand prize for the show.
Here, in all its glory and copiously illustrated with photos of horses in actual horse show situations, is the blog post I wrote about that show:
http://www.sandranathan.net/?p=175
This true story probably illustrates that I was nuts to start with.
Turned out that show had been ten years before. I’d written a bit on our ranch website and forgot about it, but my words helped this really nice person who was in a bad spot. I realized what I wanted for my writing was shelf life.
I started YourShelfLife.com and history is still being written. The blog has had almost 29,000 requests for pages in its short life, with minimal publicity efforts on my part. It contains the write up of my disastrous Amazon Bestseller day, a killer article on personality type by Reader Views’ Irene Watson, my addendum about Jungian type and writing, and my new article on winning book contests (I have 8 national awards), I’ve got guest bloggers lined up to the rafters and am having a blast.
Please join me as I join you,
Sandy Nathan