Hard to explain things to folks that don’t write the process of exploring the possibilities of getting your work published. The process is grueling, brutal, and makes it difficult to keep pressing on. The accomplishment of finishing a manuscript is an unbelievable and monumental task in its own right, but it is nothing in comparison to what follows.
Your child of imagination birthed, you are confronted with a plethora of opportunities to push the baby bird from the nest, each with their own challenges.
Self-Published works are fraught with obstacles of finding an audience, sustaining sales, getting a response from readers garnering reviews, and overcoming the stigma sometimes attached to the idea that they weren’t good enough for a publishing house.
Traditional publishing, that’s a real struggle too. Query, reject, repeat, reject, repeat, ad infinitum. Hard to from here, as a writer, to not understand the euphoric celebration of a positive rejection that contains a single workable nugget of constructive criticism. Stories abound of the search of agents ending after mountains of rejection.
So when your non-writer folks don’t get your jubilation when you get a partial or full manuscript request or a five-star review on GoodReads or Amazon, let it go. No one sees the struggle on the backside of this all, they will recognize the success when it comes.
It’s hard to explain why we suffer the slings that come from trying to get our work out into the world. Hard to explain how we get excited over seemingly small things. Hard to tell the hours funneled out for a few thousand words. Hard to explain to myself a life without it. It’s what we do, like breathing, we must.