Timely Advice

Not long ago I answered a question on Goodreads about what advise I would give to another writer just starting out. It made me think back to an event that occurred to me a few years ago. I had recently finished one of the earlier versions of A Love Beyond Time and had self published it on Amazon. I got a blogger to review the book. I was expecting to get an honest critic of my work. What I got instead was a scathing attack on my writing. I hadn’t had it professionally edited, but it is hard to get an editor when ones budget is virtually non existent. This blogger didn’t stop there. It came across to me that I should basically stop writing because I stunk at it. And then there was the offer to edit my work if I paid them to do it. Needless to say I was extremely angered and disheartened by this until someone gave me a piece of advice. Advice that I’m going to pass on to you. This advice doesn’t just apply to writing it applies to many things in life. And here’s my simple advice. When someone tells you that you’re not good enough at something say this to yourself. “Fuck’em, I’m good at this and I’m going to prove it. Not to show them that their wrong, but to show the whole world that I’m right.”
Now here’s the hard part. Now that you’ve said that to yourself you’ve got to do the work to prove that it’s true. You can’t just say it and magically have it happen. You have to work at it everyday and before long it will become true not just in your own hear and mind, but in reality as well.
After multiple rewrites that resulted in a single book growing into first a trilogy and then a quartet. And after two editors A Love Beyond Time is a published novel that has received multiple four and five star reviews. I proved the blogger wrong. My writing doesn’t stink and most of all I’ve proven to myself that I can persevere. That matters more to me than all the accolades.