Think fast!

My unending apologies, everyone. It has been a full week since my last confession blog post. I had some topics to spew about, and maybe a video here and there, but I'm not certain when I will get to them.

You see, I'm busy writing.

What's that you say, Gayle? How can you be ignoring your social media-city duties to write?

I'm at that Sisyphus stage of my third mystery, when I'm down to the last 20,000 words (don't ask me how I know, I just feel it in my bones) and even though I'm writing 1,000-2,000 words a day, I don't feel like I'm getting any closer to the end.

And I even have an outline this time.

So I've been writing and writing and subplotting and walking away to let the scene play out in my head before coming back and writing some more. Because I need to get this thing finished and let the yeast in it rise while I work on other projects.

I'll be back to posting, soon I hope, but in the meantime, here are two writing/publishing rules I live by:

1. Write a book that's better than your best effort. By that, I mean write to your own sense of perfection, and then hand it off to a professional editor at the most and beta readers at the least. Ask them to be honest, even if it means being brutal. This will make your work stronger. People who love your book because they love you are not helping you. They're just loving you.

2. Write the book you want to write, from your heart, your gut, your passion, but when it comes time to publish, take your emotions out of the equation. Look at what a publisher is offering you, not in terms of whether it's "industry standard" but in terms of whether it's worth it to you. (In these days, I'd look hard at what they'll do to promote and market.) If it looks like you'll be a pauper for the next three years, look at yourself and see if you have the drive for self-publishing. Examine it all, but don't self-publish out of anger or spite, and don't go with a publisher because you "like" them.

Hope these are helpful. See you soon.