Once more with feeling
A few years back. Well, more than a few years back, I made a change. I parted ways with my agent, took down all my social media, deleted my blog and my site, and generally withdrew from the professional world. Was it the smartest move I ever made? Probably not, but it was the truest for the person I was at the time.
But time is the issue, isn’t it? Things change, and people evolve. The needs of yesterday aren’t necessarily the needs of today.
Last year, I wrote a book. And while I’m loath to praise myself, I can only say that sometimes I wrote with tears in my eyes. Maybe I touched things only I hold deeply. Maybe those words could touch someone else as deeply. I have no idea. I’m unsure if anyone will ever find out.
When that book was done, I wrote another, and it was the best I’ve ever written. It’s the absolute pinnacle of everything I’ve done for seventeen years. I could not have written that book any better. But will anyone besides my beta readers ever see it? I don’t know that, either.
It’s hard to get started in this business, but the part no one tells you is that it’s hard to get restarted in this business once things cool off. When the Dagger nominations stop coming. When editors don’t ask for your work anymore. When things grow quiet, without even the question, “What comes next?”