Inspiration: Apply within

by Kristi Belcamino


This month I am surviving - scrabbling and fighting to survive -  my twelfth winter in Minnesota.

The land of cold and little sun.

It has not been pretty. I've been in a funk and everyone else I know who lives here feels the same way.

We look at each other and say "January."

I've been obsessively reading writers who put my writing career in perspective.

And my life.

Namely two writers who are friends and share each other's writing frequently:

Chuck Wendig

and

Delilah Dawson

Luckily, reading blogs by these two writers is pulling me through the slump.

Here is Chuck on Mid-career authors, which I realized, Hey, I'm one of them!

I’m going out on a limb here and say that, as an author grows into a career, that author starts to realize that a lot of the branding and platform talk he listened to early on is at least half a sack of monkey shit. What I mean is this: your writing career is predicated on writing books — it’s very seductive to believe that Our Every Movement Online will somehow be The Crucial Detail that sells our books. So we curate a persona and work very hard to say the Right Things and not the Wrong Things and to Demonstrate Our Social Value As A Content-Delivery-System but at the end of the day people want a book they like. They want a book they enjoy for whatever definition they have for “enjoy.” The author matters, but the author is secondary to the book. It has to be that way. You’re not an online personality. You make stories for a living. And it’s tantalizing to assume the story you should be making is YOUR OWN, but I find that at the end of the day, it’s a very big distraction and will pull you away from doing the thing you should really be doing.

Two rules here prevail:

Don’t be an asshole (and if you are, try to fix it).

And be the best version of yourself online.

That’s it. Beyond that, write books. The best you can.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2016/01/20/some-thoughts-for-you-mid-career-writers-out-there/comment-page-1/

and ... Delilah S. Dawson

How to survive the creative life: You keep going, even when the going is slow. Care for the body, care for the mind. Laugh a lot. Read more.

Here's Delilah on surviving in general - depression and anxiety and how it kicks our butts in the winter sometimes.

http://www.whimsydark.com/blog/2016/1/13/on-managing-depression-and-anxiety-just-breathe-is-my-new-motto