December Dawns On My Unpublished World

It's December.

I'm not sure how that happened, but it is.

After my last play, I posted that I was going to drop out of community theatre for awhile in a bid to concentrate on other things, particularly in jump starting my publishing efforts.  With two completed books, it was time to move onto the next phase.

Well, I've failed.

After two plus months, I really haven't moved forward very much.  I have contacted a small number of agents, and a couple of publishers, but I have done only a small fraction of what I hoped to do.

I have had some events that have taken up more time than I expected.  The OHC Writer's Guild Contest was very time consuming for me, as was preparation for a book signing event a couple weeks later.  Work has been busier than I expected, there was a church conference, and there was the loss of  Retta, my first wife and the mother of my two older boys.

Community theatre hasn't even gone completely away, supporting Benjamin in his productions, and revival performances of parts of The Diary of Anne Frank coming up soon.

My calendar has been so messed up that I have had to make, and will have to make more hard choices between competing activities.  I don't like that.  I like to be the one that shows up.

But those are just excuses in relation to my publishing career.  It's just really hard for me to do the kinds of things I need to do to get my work out there.  I don't know if it's fear of rejection or what, but it is terribly hard for me to focus on.  Query letters and such make me melt into a puddle.  And everyone single agent and publisher is different in what and how they want things presented.

The bottom line is I'd rather be writing new stuff than promoting old stuff.

I can't even decide whether I should focus on the push to find a publisher, or whether I should bite the bullet and self-publish.

The book signing event November 19th was interesting.  I made $23.25 with jerry-rigged materials, stuff in binders and chapbooks - nothing truly published.  There were about ten authors there, and every single one of them were self-published.  It made me envious that they had something and I did not.

But I still remain petrified.

December dawns and January looms with the shadow of another tax season.

I will figure something out.  Sometime.

For now, I will write.  I like to write.