I would’ve titled this post with the name of the actual festival we had here in town today, except that I’m going to criticize it a little bit, and I don’t want to cast a shadow over that particular event for any locals who otherwise enjoy it. My criticism isn’t about just our Avocado Festival.

The positive side is, I’m eating a strawberry. That’s always a good thing. In fact, I’m rich today, with three little baskets of strawberries and a good week or two’s supply of avocados. Not only that, we got some of the avocados for free, from a local business near one of the avocado packing plants. Presumably they’re cast offs from the preparation for the festival, since they aren’t very pretty ones. But they’re still delicious, and dead ripe, so I already got to enjoy some for breakfast. My favorite way to eat avocado is mashed with salt and pepper and spread on toast. Since I live with my favorite bread baker, this is the ultimate easy (for me) and delicious breakfast.

My rant is not about the immense crowd that will be there later today, even though I’m not a crowd person. I can handle crowds, and even enjoy them, in small doses. My rant is not about the local vendors who show up each year. It’s not even about the non-local vendors who show up there. After all, everybody’s got to make a buck, right? Some of the vendors are wonderful.

You can get the best local tacos, tamales, and burritos at our Avocado Festival that you’ve ever eaten, and there’s always a nice supply of fresh avocados, of course. Then there’s the standard fair fare, funnel cakes and lemonade and . . . well, the list goes on. We don’t buy most of that standard fair food, so I’m not even aware of what it all is. We usually go for the Mexican food. Some of it’s not available year round, even here, because it’s from groups or businesses that put out a special effort just for the festival. It’s a rare treat, and one of the great draws of the festival for us in the years we attend.

In the years that we attend, we’ve learned to walk there early, as soon as the booths are opening. That way we avoid the biggest crowds and the worst heat.

I’m not sure why, but the day of the Avocado Festival is always hot, even though we can get some pretty cool weather in April. Three days ago we had a high of something like 67 degrees Fahrenheit and the nighttime temp dipped into the low 40s. I wore long sleeves all day, and sometimes a sweater. Yesterday the high was over 80, and today promises to be at least that. (Update, it got up to 93 in town today!) But as usual, of those two weather patterns, the festival happens to fall on the warmer day. Or should I say the warmer day happens to fall on the festival day — the festival was planned well in advance.

Because of the heat and the larger size of the crowd later in the day, and some combination of those factors that seems to make everyone tired and cranky by afternoon, the feeling of the late day crowd changes in a way that becomes distinctly unpleasant for me. So if I don’t go early, I’m not likely to go at all. In fact, I’d just as soon the booths opened at six in the morning rather than nine.

What bothers me about the festival is now fairly universal, I suspect, to local festivals and fairs all over the country. There are very few locals selling handcrafts and artwork anymore. Many of the vendors that sell non-food and non-produce items — and some of the food vendors as well — have traveled from other places. Some of them make the rounds of, possibly, every local festival and county fair in the state, and maybe more than one state. Some are from industry, manufacturers’ representatives selling things like secure mailboxes and automatic sprinkler systems, the sorts of things you expect at home shows and trade fairs, not unique to an Avocado Festival. Some are selling manufactured clothing and home decoration items that I can buy at a department store or a swap meet. The traveling vendors have always been around, but lately they seem to be the only ones. Where are the locals? To me this trend of increasing numbers of non-local vendors is like finding the same chain restaurants everywhere you travel. That used to disappoint me when traveling on business. If there’s any perk to having to take business trips, it’s discovering local eateries that are unique to the city you’re visiting. But if you travel to another place only to eat at Outback or Chilis, you might as well have stayed home. Why go to the local festival to buy the same items that will be sold at the county fair two months from now? More importantly, why go to find items you can buy at the department or hardware store? The point of a local festival, I thought, was to find things that can be found in only one place, to celebrate that location’s unique qualities and products.

I’m glad that we still have some local businesses that sell food and a few other items there. In the years I attend, if I go early, I can pick and choose which places to visit, and I usually enjoy myself. But I miss the kinds of things we used to see more of and that I always loved festivals and fairs for: handcrafts, local artists’ work, and those really unique and unusual items that once were only found at local fairs. They seem be rare these days, almost extinct.

I’m sure there’s a reason for this. Perhaps it has to do with the process of arranging to sell at one of these events, that it’s become so business-oriented that it shuts out local artists and craftspeople. Perhaps people don’t have time anymore to make things themselves and arrange to sell them locally unless that’s their full time business. If it is their full time business, they likely have to travel from fair to fair to make it pay off year-round.

We see some of those traveling vendors selling beautiful things, like handmade herbal soaps, stunning hand-carved gourd art, and some unique pottery. It’s great stuff, and I’m glad it’s there. But, whatever the reason it’s not there, I still find the lack of local handcrafts and artwork at these events sad. I know some of the vendors hate it when I ask, “Are you from around here?” But I continue to ask. It doesn’t mean that I won’t buy what they’re selling, if I love it and can afford it. But I can’t help being more enthusiastic about finding local goods that I love at our local festival.

The only other rant I have is, where are the hats? This is the time of year our warm weather sets in. In the past I’ve arrived at the festival only to wish I’d brought a hat. I can’t be the only one. There used to be hats for sale all over the place there. I usually bought my hat there to use for yard work or walking around in the sun for any reason, because it was the right time of year and they had a nice selection for good prices. Last year I hardly saw any hats. Maybe they were there and so few that I never came across them. I hope at least the hats were back this year.

Last year, too few local handcrafts, too few hats. This year I’m not going to the festival. Can anyone connect the dots?

Maybe the real problem is that I’m not like other people who attend. Maybe most people prefer mass-manufactured, universally available things. Who knew that would become the major draw of a local festival? Maybe it’s just me.

In any case, I’m happy for the strawberries and avocados. It’s a good day.

I know a little about this tendency of writers to give up and give in, because I was one of them.

In a sense I gave up on what is probably still my best work to date, by self-publishing rather than continuing to go through rejection and revision. Now I wish I’d kept looking for an agent or publisher, kept rewriting when all the rejections (where anyone bothered to read past the cover letter) pointed out problems. Now what do I do with a book that’s been published first by a POD subsidy outfit and again by me? I’d still like to see it published by a “real” publisher, but I fear that I gave it a premature funeral.

Some good has come of all this. My mother and a few other older relatives got to see my name in print and read the story in book form, before they passed away. I’ll never regret that, but I never intended to give my book such a limited audience. I never will again.

If you don’t want to go the distance, find something else worthwhile to spend all your free hours on. If you want to be a writer, if you know in your heart you’re a writer, go for the gold. Stop reading articles about POD and self-publishing. Stop subscribing to writer’s magazines that print them. The publishing industry may very well be ripe with middle men and favoritism, with big money interests and maybe even corruption. But you the lowly unknown writer aren’t going to change that by self-publishing. Read more articles on good writing, the market, getting an agent. Learn how to structure a story or novel. Give each sentence its due attention. Read more Richard Adams. Read Annie Dillard. Keep writing. Keep rewriting. Keep submitting. Keep rewriting. Keep rewriting. (That bears repeating.) Rework it until you can see your face in it, and submit it until either it’s published or the post office runs out of stamps.

Late in 1993, after a lot of discouraging experiences attempting to sell my fiction, I decided to “quit fiction writing for good” and I wrote nothing but personal journals and technical manuals for a year. I began writing fiction again early in 1995, but with a difference. I did it, as I’d begun as a girl, to please myself, primarily to complete a story I thought had to be written or it would drive me nuts. That story had been percolating inside me since I was seventeen. I surprised myself then by doing some of the best fiction writing I had in my life to that point. My decision at that point to please only myself with what I wrote carried me through a kind of barrier into a different way of looking at writing fiction.

There’s a point where the writer has to throw out all the advice, all other opinions, and write the story that’s inside her, the one that haunts her, that begs to be written. If she begins to do it only to earn money or fame, her enthusiasm may dampen. If she exposes her writing to the wrong kinds of criticism at the wrong time, her passion may be crushed, or she may write more to please others than herself—sometimes so many others that she feels pulled in all directions at once. I’ve done that in the past, and I found myself doing it again recently—writing to please too many others. Maybe from time to time I need to “give up” again, if only to get back on track with the writing I’m supposed to do.

Of course the writer needs to learn the basics, hone her skills. Then, after writing for self, she needs to be willing to let someone edit her work and be open to revisions. The two-minute rule mentioned in the blog Eric referred to makes sense, too. Something in any story needs to draw the reader’s interest in as soon as possible, unless the writer just wants to hide her novel in a drawer and bring it out to read on her own now and then.

But I think a writer needs to begin any work of fiction out of love, a personal hunger to write it. Something has to draw the writer in, make it worth the effort, and perhaps make it impossible not to write. It may very well break the writer’s heart. In fact, maybe a writer has to let a story break her heart a little to do it right. Maybe fiction is meant to break out of one’s heart, the way love does. I usually know I’ve gotten somewhere or succeeded at something in a manuscript, when I find it brings me to some deep, heartfelt emotion.

Writing for myself sounds selfish and not very businesslike, but I think my best writing happens when I do. I’ve learned the most about myself when writing this way, and it’s the most honest writing I’ve done.

Themes emerge in what we write, truths we’ve learned about life show up in our stories, and we sometimes come face to face with our own humanity when we realize what we’re capable of imagining, when we think about what we’d do in the situations we place our characters in. These are things that don’t show up in a story intentionally, but in unconscious, serendipitous ways, through the interlocking and intersecting of seemingly disparate elements. The best writing is in many ways a revelation to the writer as much as to the reader. If getting to that necessitates shutting out what others want from our fiction, it’s worth the effort.

I can’t tell anyone how to make money writing fiction. It’s possible no one can tell anyone how. Publishers seem as mystified as anyone as to what will pay off and what won’t. But I do know how to plumb my own heart while writing, how to answer the call of a story. That’s what has kept me doing this so long in spite of all my frustrations and failures. If all I wanted were to make money, I’d have quit—for real and for good—long ago. I don’t advise anyone to write fiction for money. I plan from now on to write fiction that draws me in a way I can’t ignore and can’t resist. Even so, I know it may break my heart. But anything worthwhile in life carries that risk.

Far be it from me to judge what exactly happened with Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. I haven’t read it, and I don’t intend to—wouldn’t intend to even if the publisher hadn’t turned around and pulled it off bookstore shelves. But when I read all the off-shoot accounts of the state of book packaging today, I find myself sympathizing at least a tiny bit, as Rachel Pine seems to, with the young author. Not enough to defend her, perhaps, or to excuse what happened, but honestly—what a confusing business this has become.

I recall an old episode of The Avengers on TV, in which a publisher created a computer to crank out formula novels, then passed them off as having been written by a human being. I thought for sure that was pure fantasy until I began reading about this plagiarism case. Kaavya Viswanathan’s name is on the book’s copyright page, but according to what I’ve read so is Alloy Entertainment’s. So who is to blame? How did this happen?

While discussing it with my husband earlier today I remembered how my love of the written word manifested itself as a teenager. There were authors who could’ve written anything and I would’ve soaked up their words like gravy. Did I internalize what they said? You betcha. During those years my mind was a sponge, and I fell in love with turns of phrase, ways of using language. I recall teachers marking up my papers when I unconsciously used English spellings rather than American for words like “colour” and “favourite” because so many of my favorite authors at the time were British. (In those days the US printings of their books weren’t edited for such things as they are today.)

I don’t remember now whether it was Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave or The Hollow Hills that I first read as a hardcover from the library, then picked up as a paperback and read it again. At the end of the paperback I found a misprint of a few paragraphs, where lines were interchanged and some were left out. I marked up corrections in the margin without referring to the hardcover. A few months later I went back and checked the hardcover. I’d remembered the precise wording. I had apparently memorized those passages my first time through.

I couldn’t do that today. Today I don’t even know which of the two books it happened with. I seem to recall it had a yellowish cover and that makes me think it had to be The Hollow Hills. My brain has aged enough that such a feat would be unlikely though I may be every bit as impressionable today. It would take at least two or three readings for me to memorize even a favorite author’s wording now. I also like to think I’d realize I was remembering another author’s words, not making up my own. But who’s to know? No one offered me half a million dollars to write a book at seventeen. While that could seem to the bystander to be a lot like winning the lottery, I suspect to many writers it would mean that much more pressure to produce a product.

In Viswanathan’s words, according to Rachel Pine:

“I wasn’t aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words.” She has also apologized, repeatedly, profusely, and to my ears, genuinely. But she also seems at a loss to explain just what happened. In an interview with the New York Times, she said, “I really thought the words were my own; I guess it’s just been in my head,” she added. “I feel as confused as anyone about it, because it happened so many times.”

When I heard about Viswanathan’s novel I thought to myself it was obvious her editor had never read the Megan McCafferty novels she’s said to have lifted from, or surely this would’ve been noticed early on. Then I read this in the New York Times piece:

The relationships between Alloy and the publishers are so intertwined that the same editor, Claudia Gabel, is thanked on the acknowledgments pages of both Ms. McCafferty’s books and Ms. Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.”

So what happened there? And I wonder, are the days of the lone writer crafting a book from his or her heart gone?

In an off-shoot article, John Barlow paints a portrait of his own book packaging nightmare, and leaves me wondering why so many people need to be involved in writing a story, only to leave the author hanging out on a limb, alone, held responsible for the end product—which perhaps isn’t even really his creation. I think books are better when not written by committee. Look what that’s done to television—hundreds of channels and, more often than not, nothing new worth watching.

In this case it appears the author is to blame, and perhaps others are to blame as well. In the end it’s all about honesty, not passing off another’s work as your own. I’m relieved there’s so much outcry, because I worry these days about how accepting we are of dishonesty and half truths, and how eager our leaders are to repeat untruths until (they hope) we come to believe them as true. But it’s also important to me, in this world where we seem to have to cast blame, that the right party or parties be named. I suspect the author will take the brunt of this, while the business entities involved will continue to do business as usual.

Introverts tend not to be as outwardly expressive, or to let others deep into our worlds as readily as extroverts. We’re not bubbly, cheery people for the most part. We tend to ponder. We enjoy time alone and many of us don’t like noise or interruptions. Introversion is a natural personality trait, and though introverts are probably in the minority, there’s nothing wrong with being so. We don’t dislike people, but people are sometimes difficult for us to be with. I think this has a lot to do with energy exchange and personal boundaries. It doesn’t mean anyone’s done anything wrong. It usually means we have different styles of interacting. Different people respect varying personal thresholds.

Is either an introvert or an extrovert better than the other? Of course not, and a world of all one or the other wouldn’t work for me. I see this as a yin/yang kind of thing. I hesitate even to group people into broad classifications like this. Each person is unique, a blend of many elements, but most of us lean one way or the other toward extroversion or introversion, some more so, and I think it’s the “more so” people where introversion is concerned who wind up with others trying to change them, and feeling misunderstood.

As a quiet person, I’ve sometimes been misperceived as shy, depressed, weak, or negative. I may not always look happy, and I don’t think quickly on my feet, but I have a vivid internal life, an ability to focus, thrive on down time, and think complex problems through. I don’t like attention focused on me, and I don’t like crowds. I work best in the background. I’m better at writing than speaking. I keep a tiny, close circle of friends.

When I was young the world seemed to tell me there was something wrong with being an introvert on this planet, so for a while I tried to change who I was. Experience has taught me that short bursts of such adaptation are fine, when they fill a purpose or need. But whenever I’ve tried to force a permanent personality change in myself I’ve wound up exhausted, with a constant feeling of not measuring up. I prefer to be true to myself.

I may read and write about a lot of serious topics, but to me that’s not being negative. I wouldn’t feel honest ignoring the negative side of life, and I don’t think a one-sided view is healthy or allows for solving the very real problems in the world. When I write about serious subjects it’s likely I’m in a positive frame of mind. It’s a sign I’m optimistic that something can be done if only more people would educate themselves and voice their opinions in the right places, if they would think through how they vote, how they spend, and what in the world they support. When it’s a serious personal subject, I focus there because I think all parts of one’s life should be examined and acknowledged, there should be awareness. I try to keep a balance, to see the clouds as well as their silver lining. I don’t think being happy means I should never be serious, that I should ignore the clouds and focus only on sunshine. I can, of course—I’m often silly in fact. Others rarely see my silly side, but my husband, close friends, and pets do.

Maybe seriousness isn’t all about being introverted or extroverted. Other factors come into play in the totality of who anyone is. I like to explore the variety of cultural, social, political, familial, spiritual, historical, geographical, and ethnic backgrounds people come from. But perhaps the most noticeable and meaningful categorization I’ve found (after gender) among people, in a social or work setting, even when I look at cheerfulness versus seriousness, is that of introverts and extroverts. I’m an introvert, and sometimes I need to convince others and myself that that’s not such a bad thing.

If you’re an introvert who’s felt guilty about being one, or if you’re an extrovert with introverted friends, children, family, or coworkers and you want to understand them better—especially if you know an introverted child or teen—I recommend reading The Introvert Advantage, by Marti Olsen Laney, Psy.D. I wish I’d read it much sooner. I wish it had been required reading as soon as I could comprehend it. The author is a psychologist and an introvert herself, so she knows our type from the inside out. I’ve read this book more than once and keep it on hand as a reference tool for its helpful checklists and tips on how to live as an introvert in an extroverted world.

I started my website back in 2000, when Shadows Fall was first published, for the same reason most writers do, to promote my work. Four years later I started this blog as a way to provide up-to-date content on my website and let visitors know what I was working on—basically as a way to keep the website from stagnating when too much time passed between novels. Little did I know at the time that the blog would engage so much of my attention.

The immediacy of this format holds a certain attraction. Type, click a button, and what you’ve written is published. But that has its drawbacks. As easy as email, which carries its own risks, a blog can suck you out into public view in a way that’s scary and in some ways deceiving. It’s easy to forget you’re putting yourself “out there” to the degree we do online. After all, I’m seated here alone at my home computer as I type this into a little window on my screen. It doesn’t feel public at all, at the time I write.

I tend to be more reticent when I’m face to face with people. As a private person—in fact an introvert—I find the public aspect of blogging conflicts with those personal, internal privacy constraints. The degree of narcisim that comes into play in me when I engage in this blog or others startles me, especially after the fact, if I go back and read what I’ve said. I’ve always kept a journal, so I grew accustomed, years ago, to exploring and sorting out my thoughts by writing them down. But that used to be strictly private. Anything that might be published went through heavy editing and self-censoring. It had time to simmer, to boil down, before it left my hands and confronted other readers. Even then, I sometimes felt overexposed when submitting work. I’ve come to realize this mental exploration through words can come across in blogging and commenting as total self-absorption. At least that’s how I see it. I find myself talking about me, me, me, in a way I rarely do in real life, and then only with a select few people. I’m not sure I like doing this online. It’s a little too much of me, if you ask me.

Maybe blogging and commenting is too easy, too instant, too uninhibited—and far too permanent once it’s out there. Effective, judicious communication requires more time, more thought, more self-editing than this. I feel a need to take a step back. I’m not this spontaneous a person.

Then again, maybe getting me out of my native reticence is a good thing. The business end of writing requires that one put oneself out in the world in a way that’s uncomfortable to many of us who tend to be introverts. Writing is the form of communication we’re most comfortable with, so blog as conversation is a handy tool for us to use.

There’s a teaching attributed sometimes to Sufism, and other times to Socrates as the Triple Filter Test. It states that one shouldn’t speak until one’s words have passed through three gates or filters: truth, necessity, and kindness. Still, the questions linger in my mind, especially recently. So much of the rest of my life draws me, calls to me. I find I’m leaving the blog sit for long periods of time. I’m building dreams in the physical world that I want to pour my energy and time into.

Is all this blogging I do really necessary? Does it serve a purpose—the right purpose? If it’s all just so much babble about me or my life or my opinions, why do it at all? And what about my comments elsewhere? I’m a passionate, opinionated person. I’m an impulsive, temperamental commenter. I flare up over news or politics. I say things on the spur of the moment that I may later regret, because I didn’t think things through, or I wrote out of context to the original post, or I reacted and blurted out my first thought rather than responding from my core. Maybe I erred, or changed my mind. I’m not afraid to admit when I do that, but a comment made on a blog I visit may be around for a long time, while I may forget where it was. I have gone back and edited my posts on my blog at times, sometimes deleted them altogether. But, just as with emails, when we don’t know who they may be forwarded to, we lose control of comments.

Now this is not to say I intend to give up blogging—or commenting. I don’t. But recently I want to give all this more thought, take it a little slower. Is my attitude about this suddenly too furtive, too cautious? Am I dithering?

Sometimes I wonder if the next step beyond blogging is for the human race to become more telepathic. Here in the blogosphere we sometimes share our thoughts almost as soon as we think them. They’re not just first draft writing, sometimes they’re first draft thoughts. They spring newborn onto the screen, brain to fingers to blogosphere. Telepathy sometimes seems like the next logical step. If we need to be concerned with those three gates or filters when speaking and writing, perhaps blogging will teach us to engage them when thinking as well, to govern our thoughts, preparing us to wise up before we jump that communicative gap. Or is it possible that our thoughts already carry far more power—or distance—than we realize? Who knows?

So I wonder, why do other people blog, and how do you feel about it?
Have your reasons for doing it changed since you began?
Have you written posts or comments you regretted?
Does blogging accomplish a purpose for you? If so, what?

It’s probably healthiest for the aspiring writer to look at fiction writing one of two ways. 1) As an after-work side job or business that one is willing to give up on if it doesn’t pay off, or 2) as a beloved hobby to pursue in one’s spare time—after time with family, after taking care of responsibilities, and perhaps even after just goofing off.

There were a few years when I spent every evening and weekend writing, and every vacation editing, revising, or otherwise working toward publication. I wish now I’d just taken a trip somewhere. That would’ve made me happier, healthier, and perhaps even fed my writing more effectively. I might’ve had something more interesting to write.

Many of us grew up with the notion that if we give up on a dream, or anything we’ve invested much time or effort in, we’re quitters—failures—the next worst thing to total losers. We were taught to never quit a job unless there’s a better one already waiting. That’s probably the worst way for an aspiring novelist to think about writing with the dream of publication. An aspiring novelist’s desire to be published is sometimes like a gambling addict’s urge to place the next bet. Every failed effort leaves us planning the next time—because next time we’ll make it big. This realization hit me hard, because I don’t even like to gamble.

There’s more to life than writing.

There’s also more to writing than being published. At one time I was unhappy, and convinced myself my unhappiness was due to not being published. I quit writing altogether after a wounding critique from an agent I’d actually paid to drop me into such a trough of self-doubt. The really awful thing was, he was right, about that manuscript. I just stopped. I didn’t write any fiction for a year. After that year I still didn’t want to write for publication, but I realized I had to write this one story that had been developing in my mind for years. I needed to write it. I started it because the story wouldn’t leave me alone. After a year of writing nothing but miserable journal pages, I plunged into the first draft. I wrote my best work yet. Maybe the reason it was better than what I’d written before was that I didn’t care whether it would be published. I just wanted to write it, for me, and for the story itself. It had to come out of my head onto paper. This took a long time. It was a long story. Too long. The cutting and editing process seemed to go on forever.

As it turned out, I couldn’t interest an agent in it. Fifty submissions—yes, fifty, and not random, but well thought out submissions to selected agents—resulted in two offers to read my manuscript for a fee and “doctor” it. Instead I self-published Shadows Fall, first through iUniverse, and later on my own. A few years later I self-published Snow Angels on my website as a free ebook. (My reasons for that are a whole other post.)

These days I still want to be published—by someone else. Self-publishing is too much like publishing, which isn’t writing. Besides, it doesn’t pay. I never broke even on expenses, in spite of some glowing reviews and personally rewarding feedback from readers, which happily continues to trickle in.

I eventually realized it’s more important to live than to live for publication. In my case living includes writing, spending hours at the computer or sometimes with pencil and paper, crafting a story, and being happy doing it. As soon as I begin thinking again that I must be published, I find the writing isn’t nearly as much fun. I still visualize seeing it published. I don’t think I’d care so much about the writing process if I didn’t. But that’s no longer a reason in itself to continue writing. My happiness as a writer no longer relies on it. Instead of focusing on wanting to be published, I’d rather expend my passion on living the best life I can, including doing the best job writing when I’m doing that.

So, yeah, I’d like to be published, and published big if at all possible. I’d also like to win the lottery. But I’m not giving up the rest of my life in hopes of winning the lottery, so why would I give it up for a dream of publication? I write because I like to write.

Does this love of the process mean I’ll keep writing no matter what? No. I like to do other things, too. I have a passion for needlework, and for watercolor. I like to take lots of time to cook. I hope to travel more. Perhaps another new career altogether will take hold of my passion. (I retired early from my last career, in technical writing, editing, and distribution, and I’m not 50 yet.) I take fiction writing one project at a time, these days. While I’m writing, I have that loose possibility of publication in my head, mainly because I need to have a reader, an audience, in mind. I think that makes me a better writer, it keeps me reaching for excellence. But I don’t commit myself to continuing no matter what. If I finish this book and it sells, so be it. If I finish this book and it doesn’t sell, so be it. If I finish this book and never want to write another story again, so be it.

If a writer still enjoys the writing process and wonders if she should continue, after any length of time spent unsuccessfully attempting to publish, the primary questions I believe she should ask herself are—Am I improving as a person through writing? Do I stretch myself in the direction of publication and reader enjoyment? Do I seek feedback and can others derive satisfaction from what I write? Do I have an instinct for telling a story? Am I growing my skills? Or do I engage in this only for my own narcissistic pleasure? Because whether she does it for herself or for publication, if publication is even a vague goal, the writer needs to keep that possibility, and the need to treat this like a business, in view. Fiction is a form of communication, and that implies others will get something of value from it if they choose to read it, even if it’s simply for entertainment.

Published or not and writing or not, I intend to be happy living my whole life, not just the writing life.