Only a couple of inches down here but still enough to close the local schools.

At this rate the Easter Bunny will be surplus to requirements!

Lol! yes, I can't see us buying any easter eggs - ok, maybe a Hotel Chocolate one.

I didn't like being told what to do LOL! (take after my dad).

Lol! me too, bevly. I wonder if that makes us beter or worse writers? I think for me it means I see the difference between what is commercial and what isn't, but I still write what I like. I just means I'll have to write more of it until I hit on something I like but which also happens to be commercial...


- NaomiM

I know I started writing for fun and was very lucky to have money coming in so quickly. Would I have kept on otherwise? Perhaps for a while but certainly not for years and years. I have a friend who has given up - he has a fulltime job and three kids and simply can't continue to spare the time and emotion. I fully understand it.
I have another mate who was very up front with his publishers - when he cam eup to re-sign he wanted an amount that reflected his value and also enough to go part time at the day job. If they didn't give it he would pack it in.
HB x

and emotion

Well that is the problem, isn't it. It's not just about finding the time - for me that's not a problem. But dredging up the emotion needed to sit down day after day and sink into the mind of an 8yr old MC, not to mention the knockbacks from having submissions returned with a standard rejection letter, and the general tedium of editing...it's not as easy as people think.

Lots of snow here in the East Midlands. I'm hoping the kids school will be shut tomorrow, it was open til 12.30 today.
I write because I dream of having a book with my name on it one day, I know that probably sounds silly. The money doesn't bother me, but obviously it would be a nice bonus. I'm a daydreamer and writing is the one thing that makes sense, but if I lost the hope of being published then maybe I would stop.
I've still got christmas choc left, but I'm on a diet and trying to resist.

Hi Shelly,

Hoping the school stays shut tomorrow as well, hate driving in these conditions (school only few minutes away but we live in a semi-rural area and our road stays hazadous ). It also gives me a chance to do a bit more drawing/illustrating whilst the girls enjoy CBeebies! (I refuse to feel quilty about them watching TV for a couple of hours a day!).

It's a great feeling seeing a book with your name on it, and I don't mind admitting I still get a thrill when I show it to people who have NO idea what I do. That's one dream I've fulfilled, but like an adiction it's no longer enough! I would love to see a couple more LOL!

Going to have a cup of tea now with a bit of that left over chocolate!

Bev

Please forgive my busting in (late) to your thread, but this is such an interesting question, and I'd love to hear more answers, because my own experience is making life very difficult.

Like most of you I didn't start writing for money or publication, but because I loved it and it was all I wanted to do. I used to get up in the middle of the night to go on writing, because I was happier in the world I was creating than the one I was living in. After about a year I thought tentatively the thing might be published one day so I started working on revisions, and that was (mostly) fun too.

Then I got a publisher, and now I've got to write Book 2 - but I know so far I'm just not writing as well as I was. I can't get the joy of it back, and it scares me to death. It's all the difference between happily singing in the shower and suddenly having to stand on a stage and do it in front of a load of people - the self-consciousness gets in the way of what I'm trying to do. I'm hoping the joy bit WILL come back as I get further in, but right now I am writing CRAP and it's driving me mad.

Please - Emma, Helen, anyone - is this normal, and does it come back?

Louise

Yes, it does come back, but differently. Being published changes your whole relationship to your writing, but do you learn to integrate that with the original impulses. Second Book Syndrome is incredibly common, though it takes many forms. I know there've been threads discussing it - I'll try and find them.

Emma

I am currently writing book three and to be perfectly honest nothing has re-captured that care free enjoyment of uncontracted book one.
I wrote it for fun and I took as long as I liked.
Book two and now book three have been done 'to order' in that I have strict deadlines placed upon me and that they have been part of a series.
I still absolutely love it but there are pressures for sure. However, I want to make a career of writing, not a hobby, so this must be, I think, the quid pro quo.
HB x

I found my second published book (which was by no means the second book I wrote) very hard to write. Some of that was other crap from the rest of my life, but being under contract, and following something that was being a 'success' - and in that sense getting a contract at all is a success - was just awful in lots of ways. A paralysing self-consciousness and insecurity, a sense of pressure, a horrid awareness of markets and external things, which are so alien to the creative process, of someone being entitled to have opinions about my work because they'd bought it. I think even if it isn't actually under contract Two can still feel like that.

But I survived, and I have ended up with something I'm proud of, even though the process was remarkably like pulling teeth some of the time, and certainly not joyful. And Three is just pouring out at the moment: I feel I've sort-of, for now, got the hang of writing both for myself and for others.

Emma

Thank you so much, Emma and Helen. It's very reassuring to feel it's not just me.

But it does make one think about the original question. It suggests writing for money/publication is actualy harder to do well - and may explain why, when we're trying to get published, we can see so many pretty mediocre books already out there, while our own creatively-joyous masterpiece is as yet undiscovered.

But this is reassuring:

And Three is just pouring out at the moment

That's what I want to believe - that it's possible to write for both. I would guess it is, provided your natural creative instinct happens to be the same as what the market actually wants - ie you're not contorting yourself to fit into a market slot. Dickens would certainly fit that description; the pleasure of it just poured out of him, and the public lapped it up.

Unfortunately I'm not Dickens...

Louise