So, carrying on from my last, jabbering, mind-excretion (No.2 Part 1) - book two, pressure, zombie kittens… Oh, and yes, I am writing blog posts again! Of course it’s only a temporary thing. Soon enough I’ll be leaving months between each post, not intentionally, but just because I don’t have time. But for now, whilst I have my new book driving me to write about it (share my excitement, vent my anxieties, try to promote my work in a shameless attempt to sell enough books to make a career of being a writer), I’ll just keep on writing. (Most of it will be crap).
Crapness. I think that is the main pressure for a writer – fear of being crap. Actually it’s probably a main fear of most people, but I don’t know much about most people. For me, Crapness-fear attacks from every angle – fear of not living up to your potential; fear of losing any talent you once had; fear of being rejected by publishers; fear of being laughed at by peers; fear of failing in general; and most of all, more than anything else, something that I didn’t even have to consider first time round – fear of disappointing fans. (Okay, I may not have millions of them, but just one is enough pressure for me).
And that brings me to my one and only regret of book 2. There’s not a single part of that book that I would change – like a life lived, a written book is what it is – but I SO regret writing the acknowledgements at the end. I didn’t do acknowledgements for my first book, mainly because I didn’t have a clue what to write, but to not include them for book 2 would have just seemed rude, so in that sense I’m glad I thanked the people that I thanked. The bit that is eating me up inside is all the people who I didn’t thank. I don’t remember what I wrote or who I thanked, but I know it wasn’t enough. And now, looking back at the final sentence of the previous paragraph of this post, I wish I’d written PAGES and PAGES thanking everybody that gave me the encouragement to write a second book – every one of you who took the time to email me from the ‘contact me’ page on this blog to tell me how much you enjoyed book 1; every single person who wrote a single tweet telling me how much OSMUW made them laugh; every book reviewer who had something positive to say about what I wrote; everyone who actually supported me by simply buying the book! You all deserve my thanks.
But, even if I didn’t mention you in the acknowledgements, my thanks to you is on every page prior to that. I know it sounds cliché and cheesy and sentimental and the kind of crap you hear people say at the Oscars, but, seriously, I couldn’t have done it without you. Unfortunately though, my thanks to you may or may not be in the form of a pooed-out a zombie kitten. (That only makes sense if you’ve read the previous post).
A few other posts you might find interesting:
You make me laugh
I don’t think we “little people” expect any thanks. I know we’re the readers, and so books are kind of for us, but we’re not involved in making the book happen. In my opinion, we should be thanking you for writing the first, the second, and anything else that comes after!
And the fear thing.. you’ve already written and published one book, with the second book coming soon. You’ve already succeeded, so can’t fail. Maybe you shouldn’t think so much about us, lol. And I think it highly unlikely that us fans will be disappointed with book two
Actually I think you ‘little people’ play a huge part in making a book happen! You help give writers the confidence to write the next book (or you give them pointers on how to make the next one better), you help publishers get an idea of how a book has been received without having to rely purely on sales, and you spread the word and get people READING the book in the first place! You ‘little people’ are pretty damn big in my opinion