Don't You Quit

I started out this morning with the full intention to get everything I needed to get done finished by 9am for a change. Most days I keep this intention, but Mondays are always the hardest. It's the start of the week, and it's my usual morning to call Mom - which usually takes a 30-45 minutes of my morning (something I love to do, but still). This morning I was on track. Really I was. Rolled out of bed at six, got my coffee and my smoke, sat down to read my daily blogroll and... got derailed.

Not that it wasn't a good derailing. Hell, it was even a necessary derailing. You see, one of the first blogs I read every morning is Janet Reid's, and this morning was even a really short post from yesterday (I don't read agent blogs on the weekends). All she had was a couple sentences and a link. It was the link that did me in. I'm glad I followed it, even if it did screw up my intentions for the morning.

The link? Well, it was to a post over at Murderati. Toni McGee Causey (star of writing, publishing and blogging) wrote about the topic: How Do You Know When to Quit? She talks about a fellow writer's talk at a conference wherein she unloads the thousands of rejection letters she received before publishing and still didn't quit. She talks about the internet sensation Susan Boyle, and how she didn't quit. Toni speaks of her own path through this jungle and how she didn't quit.

The whole post was quite inspiring. I even got teary over it. (Which isn't like me unless it's getting near to a certain timeframe, and this ain't then.)

There are so many times when life pulls at you, when this writing gig seems hopeless, when you don't feel like you can take another step forward - and quitting seems like a viable option. As I said in my comment to that post, there are times when I dream about taking an easy stress-free job - like disarming bombs or juggling knives or waitressing. (If you've ever been a waitress on the 5-9am shift, carrying loaded trays of breakfast and refilling coffee for farmers and truckers and whatnot, you know why this fits.) It's times like those when I need to remember Toni's post.

It's not an every day occurrance. I don't think my writing could survive feeling like that every day. No, it's just an every once in a while urge to chuck it all and go hide some magical place where I don't have to think about plots and characters and queries and synopses and readership and... Well, you get the picture.

Judging from the comment chain on Toni's post, I'm not the only one. I never thought I was, but it feels good to see it in a more concrete way. (Ummm, not that I feel good about other people's pain, but misery does need company sometimes.)

Anyway, if you haven't read Toni's post, head on over and take a read through. It'll take up a chunk of your morning, but it's well worth the time. I feel better for it. Really I do.

And now I'm even farther behind, so I'd better get cracking... after I call Mom.