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The Walking Dead and Other Great Reasons to Procrastinate

My first post was one of those touchy-feely, show my writing style kind of posts.

This one is going to be me bitchin'. . . a little.

See, I started writing The Blood Gem on a whim back in 2008.  I think it was 2008.

I've been writing since I was a young.  I started with writing very bad fanfic (before fanfic was a thing) for the BESTEST movie ever, Aliens.  Then over the years I took about a billion creative writing classes, joined a few critique groups, and hired a writing coach. 

But like most writers, I struggle with the required getting one's ass in the chair and writing consistently.

Blood Gem was born out of a bet. I wagered with a coworker $100 bucks over who could write 3,000 words a week.  If you hit the word count, you got to keep $20.  The loser would have to fork over the money to the winner.  If we both won, the cash stayed in the kitty. 

I won every week. Money is a big ass motivator for me.

So the evolution of Blood Gem went from - something to do during office down time to oh shoot this could be a book for real to this is gonna be my first fully finished book.

At first I thought I would go the traditional route ( and I still will at some point).  You know, query letters, finding an agent, tons of rejections, yadda, yadda.  The idea seemed daunting, really daunting, but I had the dream of being a real "author". 

Then a life coach (yeah I believe in the self-improvement thing) said, "why not self-publish, I just worked with an author that is making $20,000 grand a month."

I had always pictured the life of a writer being one of the starving artist.  Starving ain't sexy, so I always wanted to have a secured stream of income before indulging in writing full time.

But that $20,000 a month got my effin attention. 

My journey of self-publishing was born. 

And my journey of procrastination continues. . .

With traditional publishing - lots of things are done for the writer (in theory) - like marketing and promotion.

For indie writer - all that additional work is on your back. 

I spent a good portion of my day today mapping out my book marketing/promotion to-do list.  My eyes hurt, I have a headache and I haven't done any writing yet.  I'm likely doing this all ass-backward.  I feel like it is all pointless. Nobody is gonna see this anyway.  I'm cranky and want to throw a tantrum.

Instead of doing one of things on my list-- writing this post-- I'd much rather be watching the Walking Dead.  I hear Rick is getting out of hand and my DVR is calling me.

I can think of a few other things I'd rather be doing. . . like eating, napping, watching the episode of V I've had on my DVR for over a year . . .

 . . .  but I want to be a successful author more. 

Work hard. Work hard. Work hard and smart Michelle.














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