Am I a Writer or an Author?

Make Mine Mystery

May 2, 2017

Every day, I sit down at my desk and write for about two and half hour a day, three hours a day, seven days a week. I write with great anticipation, excitement, and fear. I write thousands of words. I delete a thousand more. I let the story guide me. I indulge my fantasies and plot lines. I write scenes I can see and feel intensely, with no idea where they’d end up in the book, and I worry if it would all came together in the end. 

And sometimes I feel like a writer, a real writer. It’s an amazing feeling. I’ve just  finished a book that I began two years ago, every step has been pain staking, the editing took over a year, and yet I’m never quite satisfied, and I stress over the outcome. And somewhere along the way, I’ve learned this lesson: everything I want and need out of writing a book comes from the actual act of writing a book. The rest of it –sales and marketing, what other people think – is the stuff that matters later or maybe it doesn’t matter at all, because I can’t control most of that stuff, anyway.

How’d the book turn out? Good, I think. It’s at the publisher right now, so in time I’ll let you know how it all worked out. I’m sure there will be another round of editing.