Wake Up Call
How did I lose track of what I love to do?
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This is a personal post. I hope you don’t mind that. However, maybe you will find something helpful in what I have to say.
Yesterday, I opened up a file that has been sitting on my computer way too long. It’s a novel I wrote, but have not edited. It’s called Houston, We Have a Murder! It’s a novel in my Dark Side of the Moon mystery series. A cozy style mystery set in a small underground town on the moon at the start of the twenty-second century.
It’s been languishing on my hard drive for three or four years. Yesterday, I edited the first nine chapters. Even though, I generally dislke editing, it felt good. At this rate, I should be ready to publish sometime in late April or early May.
But the question that is probably on your mind (and mine, too) is why it has taken so long to do this. Well, the truth is I got distracted by several other things that I prioritized over it. I was teaching my writing classes on SavvyAuthors, building Wordmaster Academy, doing marketing and promotion, writing nonfiction books. These are all short term projects that show an almost instant profit.
I fell in with some bad company. Entrepreneurs. Okay, I’m only half joking. I actually pick up a lot of marketing tips and some really inspirational stuff as well. But so much of the conversation is about business and showing profit. And that can sink into one.
But this last month, I’ve had a wake-up call. Okay, the phone has been ringing for months, but I finally picked up the receiver. I’ve been dizzy most of the time, experiencing fatigue, and shortness of breath. Walking from the living room to the bedroom leaves me exhausted as if I had completed a marathon. And I have completed marathons in the past, and honestly, this is worse.
So, I finally went to the doctor. She now wants me to see both a cardiologist and a nephrologist (Kidney doctor). Heart and kidneys – totally unimportant organs, right? And when one is 71 years old, that kind of gets your attention.
As I said, a wake up call. It is one thing to accept one’s mortality in the abstract, but when that final summons could be imminent, it forces you to rethink your priorities.
For the last four years, I’ve been spending more time creating courses about the teaching of writing, promoting those courses, and writing articles about writing instead of actually writing myself. I have at least five novels that are in various stages of completion that I have neglected. Some are just a few chapters from “the end.”
But when I thought about working on them, my business side said, “No, you have “paying” jobs awaiting.” I let my purse dictate my choices. That was fine when writing was my only source of income. I had to choose the projects that can turn a profit in the short run. But I’m not in that place anymore. I have a decent pension, royalties from books I’ve written, and income from my existing courses. I don’t have to do something each day to promote my “business.” I can take the time to just enjoy writing.
I know that my entrepreneur friends (most of whom are 30-40 years younger than me) wouldn’t understand this. But I think my writer friends do get it.
Cut loose time for writing the things you enjoy writing which may take a while to show a profit, or might not show a profit at all. Unattach yourselves from the business of writing long enough to enjoy the art of writing at least a few minutes each day. And don’t wait for an appointment with the cardiologist to make you understand that truth.
BTW, my appointment is today, so I could use some prayers.