Tag Archives: Publishing

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Pride and Trepidation

Before I get into my post, I would like to say how proud I am of my older son. Today as part of his student council duties is collecting canned goods for the student council food drive to help our local soup kitchen. The fourth grade seems to be winning their competition for what he called “the best prize of all: the warm fuzzy feeling of helping people in need”. I don’t know what I did, but I must’ve done something right. That boy will change the world I think.

Now that we got the “pride” part of our title out of the way, I enter into the “trepidation”. As my last post pointed out, I was terrified at the idea of publishing my chapter-ed short story. I always tell my son, “sometimes no matter how afraid you are, you need to suck it up and dive head first”. That post made me realize that I said a typical parental hypocritical statement. How could I tell him “you can be anything in the world you want to be if you want it enough” and “just hold your worries and do it” if I wasn’t going to do the same. As parents it’s our job to show our children that you need to always aim higher to accomplish goals, no matter how impossible it seems. Teaching your child to settle for what they have in life, to me, teaches them that they don’t need to dream and that settling for mediocrity is ok. (I know I’ve said this point a dozen times, but it needs to be emphasized.) It’s never ok to settle.

I took this to heart, and took and deep breath and uploaded my story to Kindle epublishing. Yes, I am officially published. So you can own this piece of art for only $0.99 on the Kindle. Don’t have a Kindle? Get a nice Kindle app on your phone, iPad, other tablet, etc. The title you ask? “Teagan” by Brianne LaRochelle.

I’m terrified. I’m afraid that I failed at that the story is crap and people will insult me and I’ll decide to give up instead of getting better. But if I didn’t just suck it up and do it, I’ll never know if people actually will enjoy it. I’d never know if following my dreams of writing would pay off. Most importantly though, I’d never be able to tell my sons that “mommy was scared, and she did it anyways.” Our actions, as unimportant as they seem, will always affect our children because they look up to us to show them everything.

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Is The Story Ever Really Finished?

Last year, I finished my 12000 word “novella”. It was supposed to be part of National Novel Writing Month, but I didn’t quite reach the minimum they had if you recall last year’s post about it. (See here for a refresher: http://wp.me/p1NwSb-28) I realized that I happened to finish the story I wanted in much shorter words than I was supposed to. To add things would’ve fluffed up my story in a way that would upset me.

Shortly after, I decided that the story was 100% done. I announced that my hard work was completed and the encouragement I received was awesome. I intended shortly after to put it up for sale on the Kindle, but it never seemed good enough. I sent the story to a few trusted people and got lost. Between a pregnancy made me too tired to work on more editing at first, then just made it too uncomfortable to sit down and fix it at the end, it seemed like it would never get done.

Now I wonder if I stalled it. Maybe I was just too scared of critics and reviews and anything negative that could possibly deter my dream of finally just publishing this. The story has a bit of “fart” humor to it, and it’s not always appreciated. Maybe people would think I put too many sarcastic lines or too many lines that might insult or gross out and think people would think it was unnecessarily overdone. It’s always fear of criticism of others that holds us back.

I constantly reread it. I’m at a point where I couldn’t even fix grammar problems because I’m “too close” to this project. It seems like an extreme form of procrastination that it took a whole year to feel like it’s really ready for the public. So ideally within the next week or 2, I will just close my eyes and upload it and hope for the best. Even 20 sales will exceed my expectations and be encouraging. And if I do get too caught up in how long it took to get to the publishing point, at least I can look at George RR Martin. One year for a 12000 story seems equivalent to how long we’ve waited for A Dance With Dragons. Let’s hope I build up the courage to do this.