I try not to be envious of the good fortune of others but it happens. These days, I can’t look at my Instagram feed without seeing one new book release, or cover reveal, after another.
Dozens and dozens, they form a dizzying stream as I scroll down. Enough books to fill the Library of Congress, it seems, and that’s just in any given month. Don’t get me wrong. I truly celebrate my author friends’ publications and successes, and I wish them nothing but the best. At the same time I get frustrated by my seemingly glacial pace in getting my work in progress from the page to the screen (device screens, that is). Am I the only author who doesn’t write in their sleep? Who doesn’t put out a book a year? Who hasn’t had a cover reveal since cover reveals became a thing?
Then I remember there was a time I was writing a book every six weeks. This was while I was ghostwriting for the Sweet Valley High series. I used a typewriter back then, and when I wasn’t at my desk, I wrote longhand in a notebook. Later when I published adult fiction, starting with my first novel Garden of Lies, I was writing a book every eighteen months or so. And I’m talking some hefty tomes. Those bad boys weighed in at 400-500 pages each. One year I wrote a novella, The Diary, and still managed to put out a full-length work on schedule.
Then there was the year I did a novel AND a cookbook. While I was testing 150 recipes for Something Warm from the Oven, I was penning my Carson Springs novel, Taste of Honey. When other people would remark on the fact that I’d actually lost weight while I was doing all that baking, I would explain that I was running up and down between floors in my multi-storied house multiple times a day, answering the call of my oven timer (my office was on the top floor and the kitchen on the basement level) the entire time.
In the early years, I was raising my two young children while I was churning out all those books. That, and frequently hosting guests in my home as the company wife to my then husband, the literary agent. How did I do it all? I wonder now. How can I recapture that lightning-in-a-bottle?
The secret, I concluded, is to not allow yourself to get distracted. Keep putting one foot in front of the other—or rather, one sentence in front of another—and eventually you’ll get to the finish line. Maybe sooner than you expected. If it’s later than you expected, so what? No one is going to die if a book doesn’t get finished on time.
Comparing yourself to others is a sinkhole to avoid as well. Whenever I start to get sucked into that mire, I tell myself, “What would I say to an author friend who felt as I do right now?” I would tell her life is not a race, nor is writing a competitive sport. I would remind her of how far she’s come and hard it is to write a book, any book, even a bad one. Then, after dispensing these imaginary pearls of wisdom, I turn around and give myself the same advice. And a high-five while I’m at it.
So now that I’m on the home stretch with my work in progress, I give myself permission to take the occasional break from social media and its constant drumbeat of book release announcements and cover reveals that can give rise to feelings of inadequacy. Because green-eyed monsters, like sleeping dogs, are best not disturbed.
