BREAKING NEWS
It has come to my attention that approximately one person, possibly more, found my last post about publishing as uplifting as a tax audit. Look, I’m not here to sell you unicorn glitter or promise your debut novel will fund a yacht made of caviar (and anyway, that would sink). The publishing world is less “overnight success” and more “marathon through a haunted house”—terrifying, unpredictable, and occasionally someone hands you a corn dog.
We’re all weirdos who write because NOT writing feels like forgetting to breathe. Money? Please. If we wanted cash, we’d sell our souls to corporate jargon or start a cult about kale.
Let’s focus on metrics like:
Appearances
Platform growth
Building new connections
Reviews and mentions
Opening doors to new opportunities
That’s why we made The Write Kit—not to turn you into J.K. Rowling’s secret twin, but to help you survive this chaos with snacks and a roadmap. We’re the friend who says, “Yes, you should write. We can have dinner another night.”
Keep scribbling, dreaming, and accidentally inventing new curse words. The world needs your weird.
Oh Liz, you are so right, and I am so taken up with the real meaning of the word retirement that I can’t find myself time to actually write. I think I used to write when I didn’t have any time to live or perhaps when I didn’t have any money to live But now I feel like living all of the time especially since I hit 76 and I’ve straightened out all my banking matters so that now I am receiving royalty checks. Lots of them! It seems that they were going to old banks and bouncing back and since they had nowhere to send them, they didn’t bother writing me a note, but instead just kept the money on which they made interest. Not much I’m sure, but until I finally reached them, they weren’t about to step out of their way to find out where I had gone. Meanwhile, I had been trying to reach them all, and that was impossible. So does making money and getting royalty checks and realizing that people are reading your books again, make you any more likely to write? Not for me, not now when most of the friends I had are gone, somebody took them away, and the ones who are still alive are struggling and busy and younger. So I’ve been trying to live as much as I can whenever I can and to get a lot of sleep, to keep losing weight and visiting the alterations man across the street, every other month to take things in I find I love to go shopping now because everything fits me and looks good. I am so happy just to be alive that I find that that’s all I might be able to write about being happy to be alive at 76 when so, many of my friends have been taken away. So hopefully I’ll get back on track next time there’s a pandemic and the way things are going in the United States with Tusk, there’s likely to be a pandemic 😷 sooner than we think.
This post goes down much easier. Thank you.