Ten Years Have Got Behind You
Sarah Hoyt has an interesting post at her blog about looking back on your life and mid-life crises. In her case it was precipitated by a trip home to Portugal to visit her parents, who are still in good health at the moment but are approaching the age at which frailties and health issues tend to multiply and snowball.
And as I re-read it yet again, I'm nodding along. Not just getting along with parents best when visits are limited in duration and end when both sides still wish we could stay a little longer, or the feelings of guilt about past conflict because of the knowledge that one's parents are growing old and thus becoming uncomfortably aware of their (and by extension, one's own) mortality.
But the sense of being at that point of looking back over one's life to date and wondering how you got from the threshold of adulthood to where you are now, wondering whether you made the right decisions or a bunch of terrible mistakes, and whether the things you gave up to get here were worth it. I think it's worse for me because so much of my adult life has been reverses: again and again things would start going right, I'd make some progress, and just as I thought success was firmly in hand, it all melts away like so much cotton candy and things start going backward at a frantic pace. Decisions that seemed prudent at the time, from repairing a vehicle rather than replacing it to staying at home during the worst of the winter months, turn out to set us up for major problems that reduce our range of options down the road, making it that much harder to recover from the next difficulty.
And worse, the feeling that I spent so many of those years waiting. Always in preparation mode, but never starting to do. And now feeling a terrible resonance in that line: "No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."
I spent so long trying to get one after another novel ready to submit for traditional publication, only to decide halfway through that it was unmarketable and move on to another, that I missed the beginning of the indie boom. When people on Baen's Bar were first saying to submit to Baen and if the book was rejected, go indie with it, I should've immediately dug my three finished novels out and gotten them spiffed and up. Instead, I thought in terms of the novel I was working on right now, not the ones I'd trunked, and thus missed critical points at which it was still easy to build an audience, when even a very modest offering would be grabbed by people eager to read something.
As a result I'm trying to launch my indie career from a standing start at a time when the market is flooded with stuff, so that it's hard to get noticed in the sea of offerings, and just "trying harder" to promote is apt to be "turn the volume up louder and louder until people plug their ears and edge away." It's hard to keep up optimism and enthusiasm when every promotional effort produces a little spike of sales, only to have them flatline again a day or two later.
And as I re-read it yet again, I'm nodding along. Not just getting along with parents best when visits are limited in duration and end when both sides still wish we could stay a little longer, or the feelings of guilt about past conflict because of the knowledge that one's parents are growing old and thus becoming uncomfortably aware of their (and by extension, one's own) mortality.
But the sense of being at that point of looking back over one's life to date and wondering how you got from the threshold of adulthood to where you are now, wondering whether you made the right decisions or a bunch of terrible mistakes, and whether the things you gave up to get here were worth it. I think it's worse for me because so much of my adult life has been reverses: again and again things would start going right, I'd make some progress, and just as I thought success was firmly in hand, it all melts away like so much cotton candy and things start going backward at a frantic pace. Decisions that seemed prudent at the time, from repairing a vehicle rather than replacing it to staying at home during the worst of the winter months, turn out to set us up for major problems that reduce our range of options down the road, making it that much harder to recover from the next difficulty.
And worse, the feeling that I spent so many of those years waiting. Always in preparation mode, but never starting to do. And now feeling a terrible resonance in that line: "No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."
I spent so long trying to get one after another novel ready to submit for traditional publication, only to decide halfway through that it was unmarketable and move on to another, that I missed the beginning of the indie boom. When people on Baen's Bar were first saying to submit to Baen and if the book was rejected, go indie with it, I should've immediately dug my three finished novels out and gotten them spiffed and up. Instead, I thought in terms of the novel I was working on right now, not the ones I'd trunked, and thus missed critical points at which it was still easy to build an audience, when even a very modest offering would be grabbed by people eager to read something.
As a result I'm trying to launch my indie career from a standing start at a time when the market is flooded with stuff, so that it's hard to get noticed in the sea of offerings, and just "trying harder" to promote is apt to be "turn the volume up louder and louder until people plug their ears and edge away." It's hard to keep up optimism and enthusiasm when every promotional effort produces a little spike of sales, only to have them flatline again a day or two later.