Dare To Be Stupid

A hillman, dumb as his rocks, just didn’t know how to quit. – Lois McMaster Bujold, “Memory.”

The situation as of February 2015 is as follows:

I have two books out, Rain on Your Wedding Day, published in 2013, and Wreathed, published in November of last year.
Rain on Your Wedding Day has done moderately well, for a self-published book. (This is like saying, “You don’t sweat much, for a fat girl.”) One of these days I am going to have to update the dollar figures, if only for my own benefit, but the book has made back all the money I initially sank into it in terms of editing and cover design and whatnot. (There is no way–by which I mean no way on this planet–that it will ever make back all of the time and energy that I put into it, especially when you count the time I wasted trying to get the damned thing traditionally published, but there you go.) It has not done too terribly well over the last year, and I am beginning to doubt that I’m going to ever truly break even on it.
On the other hand, Wreathed has (so far) done terribly poorly. It has not earned back a tithe of the cost of the editing, much less the cover design. (I am the first to admit that I spent a lot more on the cover design than I should have, but the cover is just so awesome that I still think it was worth it.) Reviews have been all over the board–but the good reviews have been kind of generic and the bad reviews have been hyper-specifically awful.
I am about two chapters in to the sequel to Wreathed, which is tentatively called Wedded. I have big chunks of it outlined in my head. I know how to develop all the conflicts, and how to make them funny. I have the plot twist down cold. Everything is in place to where I could finish the book without too much strain. (I even have an idea of how to do the cover on the cheap.)
And yet, I have not written a word of Wedded since the first of the year. Not because I don’t think I can finish the book. Not because I don’t have confidence in my abilities. Not because I don’t think it would be good. I haven’t worked on the new novel because I have the nagging suspicion that spending time on it would be a really stupid thing to do.

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate. Don’t think. Act.

― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

Now, look. I have a lot of respect for Pressfield. He is a smart dude and has been more successful at this writer thing than I ever have. The concept of Resistance is an incredibly useful one (although I don’t buy in to everything that Pressfield says about it, namely the part about neglecting your family to write).

But I have a hard time buying into this.

Now, it’s undeniable that one of the ways that several (I won’t say many, although I expect that’s the case) people have found some level of success as independent author/publishers is by writing novels in a series. I understand the appeal of that. Certainly one way to get more reads for Wreathed is to write the sequel, and perhaps another. But that would seem to work better for, you know, books that have been successful.

You know, not for books that have been, well, the exact opposite of successful.

I know what Pressfield would say. Trust the soup. Do the work. Make the commitment to get the book finished and edited and out in the world.

I know what Napoleon would say. “Never reinforce failure.”

I know what Weird Al would say. “Dare to be stupid.”

 

The only question is, what do I want to do?

And I don’t know.