keep writing – Official website of Sylvie Grayson

Beautiful day today, the sun is shining and it’s warm outside. There was frost this morning, yet by 9 am it was 5 degrees, and now closer to 8, so I went outside to prune my non-productive fruit trees.

I have two – a pear, and a crabapple. The crabapple has consistently given me a good crop of fruit, and I make applesauce, apple butter, apple jelly most years.

The pear not so much – last year was the first year in 12 seasons that we got any fruit, probably because I pruned it within an inch of its life.

There was a cat in my garden—a beautiful animal, all black, brown and grey stripes, with a tag around its neck, so it has a home. They do like to roam. I also saw the first alligator lizard of the season. Still waiting to hear the chorus frogs, they are late. Spring is here! Time to get busy on the next book.

SYLVIE’S READER TEAM

Are you an avid reader? Would you like to be a member of my Reader Team? You would get advance copies of each book before it is released, with a chance to be first to leave a review. There’s still room!

Email me at the address below with the topic—Reader Team. Please specify Contemporary Romantic Suspense or Sci fi/ Fantasy (Some prefer both ?) Many thanks! sylviegraysonauthor@gmail.com

Sometimes it seems like I’ve poured my heart and soul into my work and it is isn’t enough. The feedback is critical, my readers wish for more. But I have to keep going.

Why? Because I’m committed to this. I want to write and publish my novels. I want to please readers with my work. It fulfills me.

So how to handle the rocky road, the potholes and washed out places in the path?

I just finished reading The Nearly Ultimate Guide to Better Writing. It has been put together by Mary Jaksch, chief editor of the blog Write to Done. It’s a book of inspiration. Write to Done can be found at writetodone.com and the book is currently free at that website. The essay that has really hit home for me is by Larry Brooks, as he talks about the sacrifices James Patterson made to get to where he is today in his writing career. He never settled, he didn’t quit.

How dedicated am I to this career path? If ‘no’ really means ‘try again’, then it’s important to remember that when I receive a rejection slip, or someone writes a doubtful review about my novel. Sometimes it’s hard to keep that in mind. If I get a few negative messages in a row, I start to wonder why I’m wasting my time. But show me an author who hasn’t received that kind of feedback and I’ll show you a writer who quit. Nearly everyone who has succeeded at writing has had to face rejections, questions about their work, requests to revise, revamp, rewrite, toss it and try something else.

An interesting book is Open, by Andre Agassi. It is fascinating in that he lived his whole life to play tennis, and hated it. His father and then trainer pushed him to work until he began to succeed. Yet he didn’t do it for the love of the game. He trained, worked, sweat because he felt pushed to do it. But it was the sweat and tears, the repetition and training that brought him where he ended up – at the top of the world of tennis.

No one is pushing me. No one says I have to write, to rewrite, to edit, to produce words. And yet I do. There’s no reason to think I can get there any faster than the person who had to practice and train for endless hours to be an athlete, to finish a masters degree in physics, to start their own company from scratch. Just keep working, keep writing, keep pushing. You can do it too.