6-13-16
Picking up the thread again, regaining focus, and consistency – as a writer this is the journey –
It’s Monday morning and I’m already wiped out. Wrestling with a bad head cold, sinus thing you see. My lovely girl, Fran was down with it the last two weeks and I did my best to take care of her. And as they say, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
I have it now.
But It’s a small price to pay to see her well and back to her old self again. And I’m not just saying that. I mean it sincerely. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I don’t know where I’d be without her. Probably where I was when she found me, drinking beer, grunting and banging rocks together and getting all excited when I saw fire.
Now however, after a haircut, grooming, and basic lessons in English, I’m relatively socialized.
And I’m writing again! And that’s what I’m here to talk about this week. The writing. Or more specifically the consistency in that writing, because a writer who does not write is a man going slowly insane. Consistency is also the key to success in that endeavor. More than anything else I believe, consistency. It is the Long Walk.
That consistency though, is also one of the most difficult things to achieve for some of us, precisely because it’s so easy to lose. All you have to do is just, stop. Just stop moving.
There’s a lot of reasons to stop moving too, all bundled up in that all encompassing factor of life. A lot of reasons that seem like good ideas at the time. Time management, stress, work, depression, lack of inspiration, all sorts of things. And it can be damned difficult to get started again. Just ask Fran, she’s been on my ass, God Bless her, for months, and longer, to get me restarted, because she knew, wisely, she knew, that consistency was crucial, and I had sacrificed it, and with it, my momentum. In my particular case I stopped largely because I lost sight of something else that’s very important to anyone looking to write professionally.
“The making of art, and the selling of it, are two distinctly different enterprises.”
I had failed to realize, and many of us do who seek to follow the dream of being a professional, that writing is actually a two fold job.
You must be a writer, and you must run the business of that writing.
And in following blog posts I’ll be going over each of those points I just made, because I believe we learn more from our failures than we do our successes. Which is how we turn those failures into successes. And I intend to share that with others so I hope you’ll be following along with me.
But my intent in this post, was to simply get back in touch, and let you know what I’m doing. And to stay accountable to you, my reader, so we can get that consistency and momentum back.
First off, I’m wrapping up a Civil War Romance “More Than Honor”, that has been on my plate for a while now. I’m about 55,000 words and change into it, with maybe another 40,000 or so to go. I’ve made the decision to submit that to a publishing house, so according to their guidelines I can’t publish or make available too much of that before hand. But I can keep you up on progress, which I’ll be doing.
Second of all, there’s an old project I’ve decided to revive, that was pushed aside because of that loss of momentum. I’m sure some of you remember my project “Carry The Colors” dedicated to the United States Military and her veterans. The first book of that project, the Marine Corps Anthology was written and in fact self published on Amazon, but I’ve since pulled it, revised the entire project, and I’m reforming, and rewriting it completely into novel, rather than anthological form. And I’m going to be delving into that in much greater detail very soon, and I am massively excited about that, and hope that you will be too. Because it’s a subject very dear and sacred to me, and that’s precisely why I never gave up on it. I just revised it.
So please, stay tuned, like the Author Page, like the Website http://www.bencolemanauthor.com/
And always keep reading, and WRITING, because there’s so much more to come.
Until next week,
Ben Coleman.
