My exact words when my critique partner and I made the decision to self-publish in 2011. But as a writer /mentor /friend said to me two years later, "You pretty much put it up and walked away." She laughed with me as I acknowledged that she was absolutely right. But it wasn't a lost cause.
Since I created my first website with iWeb back in 2007 with the mantra "Believe" I've never stopped believing I could find some measure of success writing. One of my favorite quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
This is no small thing to keep reminding yourself in the midst of writers block, family pressures, and repelling all the negatives back then for NOT self-publishing. No, I didn't do it right, but I learned a lot about rites of passage, about believing in myself, my strengths (which were greater than I thought), my weaknesses, and my abilities.
So in 2014, when I decided to restart my career, I set a goal of having four books ready by July for the Romance Novel Convention, my overall goal seven books in the contemporary and paranormal romance genres. My mantra for the months leading up to this seemingly impossible task was "I can do this". I whispered it to myself when I doubted it and when I didn't. In the end, I revamped my website, ran my business during the heaviest part of the season, revised, wrote, and published four books by July and was only one book short of my goal by the end of the year.
After that, things changed again. My day jobs became more demanding and stretched from January through August which meant my writing slowed, still, even though they were later coming out, I was able to publish four more books in 2015. Then my heavy writing months came around again and I took a trip to Scotland. Then my husband broke his arm and I fell behind again. And once again, I've fallen back on that phrase that keeps me going no matter what, no matter how much writing space I have - I. Can. Do. This.
They were important words to remember over the holidays when I was trying to get all my books up on the various platforms and (forgive me, Mr. Goethe) I almost gave up.
That's the thing. The mark of a really big challenge is the feeling that there's no way we'll be able to accomplish it. And the reward is always knowing we did.
One of my favorite worn and patched posters says it best:
This is day #3 of the 30 day blogging challenge. I'm not even going to tell myself I can't complete it. I'll just try to keep writing and plan as many titles for my posts as I can each day along with one pertinent blog. I hope you'll come back.
To learn more about my books, visit my website at http://liviaquinn.com/books.htmlhttp://liviaquinn.com/books.html http://liviaquinn.com/books.html or sign up for my newsletter to get release alerts and be entered to win prizes here
