No Problems Ever Again

It’s so easy to look at people who seem to have achieved all the success you dream of and imagine that if you get *there,* you will never have problems again. It isn’t true.

As a beginner, you are anxious all the time about if you will ever be published, ever earn any money, ever be taken seriously by people around you. The worries don’t go away as you become more successful. The targets just change. Instead of worrying if you will be published, you worry about reviews and awards. You worry about sales numbers living up to expectations. You worry about editors changing and the vision of your project shifting.

As a beginner, you often struggle to fit work time in around a job, around childcare, around personal needs. But this doesn’t change, even if you are able to quit your day job and be an author full-time. Suddenly, you have to answer more emails, do events (often without much or any compensation), travel to do events, keep up social media, and make sure you actually have a wardrobe that looks decent. You might have to deal with deciding if you want to take a movie deal, if you are interested in working on someone else’s project and on and on. You are asked to produce more and more quickly, too.

Very few full-time authors I know can actually devote more than a couple of hours a day to actually sitting down and writing (listen carefully and you can hear them laughing right now–a couple of hours? if they had a couple of hours every day, they’d be thrilled!). And even when they do have time to write, this is often on an airplane, in a hotel room, or in the middle of a convention.

As a beginner, you want to make sure you make a good impression on people in the business. You cultivate friendships. You make sure you don’t burn bridges. But it only gets more difficult because you are meeting more and more people, and you are meeting them more often. You go to cons and everything you do is watched and noted, sometimes put up on social media. You are never “off.” You never have time to just rant without thinking about how it looks to other people. You can never have a day when you get to be mean to everyone because you’re tired or feeling sad about a death in the family. You are always a persona.

As a beginner, you try to convince people that you are a “real” writer. Your parents, your spouse, your children, your friends. Your high school alumni, your college roommates. On and on. And then you get a book published and you think everyone will cheer for you. But they don’t. People turn on you precisely because you’re successful (not everyone, not the ones who really matter, but still … ) People you barely remember come out of the woodworks and start assuming you will do things for them that you don’t have time for. And then there are the people who think you’ve become too “big” for them simply because you can’t go out to lunch as often as you once did. Sure, they think you’re a real writer now, but you’re a bitch.

I’m not trying to complain about success or say that I wish I was still an aspiring author. I don’t. I’m happy with where I am in my career right now. But it’s not all roses and ice cream, that’s all I mean. Wherever you are, that’s where you are. There are good things and bad things about being there. Moving up means you also get to learn how to deal with new good things and bad things. Sometimes they’re easy. A lot of the time they’re not. Just take it easy and don’t be angry with yourself if it turns out success is harder than you thought it would. It really is. It isn’t just you.