I need to regain focus on my priorities. Creative motivation needs to come from somewhere. Do I want to be a writer? Do I want to earn 100% of my income from writing?
Yes. My answer is yes.
Then why aren’t you writing every day? Why can’t you find creative motivation? Why do you trick yourself into thinking that you are writing every day with these morning pages? Does this count? Is this going to provide you with income? Is anyone ever going to read this? Is this interesting at all?
You know what you need to do. You need to write. You need to find something that you are passionate about and write write write. What are you waiting for? The excitement and newness of publishing a novel is over. We forgive you for getting wrapped up into that. But you’re not done. You won’t be done for a while. There is a lot of work you need to do. Mailing list, outreach, advertising.
Don’t give up on it.
Every day, do something else to promote or something that will go into promoting, like making that video you say you’re going to make. Don’t get discouraged because no one is buying your book. Just keep moving forward. You don’t care one way or another. You did it. You got it out there like you wanted to. It’s available in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and soon in audiobook. Like you said it will be. Somehow you’ll need to be able to afford to pay for the audiobook, but stay in there. Don’t give up on it, damn it.
You don’t have to write The Swedish Fish. You don’t have to write a sequel to Naughy Week. But you have to write.
Dig for it. Dig for that creative motivation.
What happened to that Eleanor and Earhart project? You were excited about that one. You were going to keep that one for yourself. You pitched it to a friend, and she said that could be a book, too. Why not make that a book? You’ve got the outline already. Or part of one. There’s a lot of research that needs to go into that one, but it could be fun. That’s not quite the book that’s going to be banged out in a month.
What about that other project? The memoir from when you worked at that place? That’s a first-person point of view novel. That’s stream of consciousness, or seemingly stream of consciousness, like American Psycho. Why not write that one?
What are you waiting for?
You say you are a writer, so write damn it.
The TV projects may never go. You could write two books and finish a pilot before you even pitch one of those. The TV thing is not the answer to all your problems. It could help you financially to sell a pitch, but then what? What else do you have?
Get to work.
