My Mistake

Shorter post today, but I think it’s important.

See, caught up in my excitement last time, I made a grievous mistake. I got so caught up in telling everybody to put themselves out there that I forgot to talk about the conditions. In a lot of ways, I was actually giving bad advice. And that's because I was talking to everybody, but not about something that everybody should do. It all depends on where you are. What stage of the process you're in.

And I'm saying this because making your work available to the public for free is reckless if you take it as blanket advice. It would be wrong to start posting your novel or all of your favorite, most promising stories. You know, the things you want to get paid for. You have to be careful with those things because they are the most valuable things for your career. Those are the things you submit to magazines, The things that get their first few chapters submitted to the publishing house when they're ready.

And if you're at the point where you have the stories or the novels or the poems and the confidence to get them published, then what I was telling you last time just does not apply to you very well.

But if you don't have those stories/novels/poems, or you just don't have the confidence to take the next step with them, finding something new, something that you don't mind giving away for free can be a very good thing. And it can because it can help you gain confidence in your talents to believe that people want to read your other work. Or, at the very least, it can just help you practice writing. In the end you just have to find something that will keep you writing consistently and build your confidence. There is nothing more important than those two things when it comes what we do.

It's about conquering the fear of being an author. About getting to the point where you can be an author. If you're already there, you're ahead of the game and I really look up to you. Because it's hard, and I know that I have a long way to go.