Monday Morning Musings
Hi writers, I hope everyone had a nice weekend. I spent mine working on a few odd jobs around the house (fixing our leaky kitchen faucet, mowing the grass, cleaning…
Hi writers,
I hope everyone had a nice weekend. I spent mine working on a few odd jobs around the house (fixing our leaky kitchen faucet, mowing the grass, cleaning up the house) and my wife and I took our dog to the lake to play in the water. It was very relaxing.
It was the sort of weekend where I looked around at all of the things I had going on and felt pretty good about them. It made me think of something that my Tae Kwon Do instructor once told me, which went something kind of like this:
"You need to take time to appreciate where you are at this exact moment in time, to enjoy the journey..."
I try to apply the things I learn in my martial arts class to my writing and my career, and I think this bit of advice is important. It's easy to become very goal focused, especially when thinking about marketing or publicity. I try to occasionally step back to remind myself to focus on one task at a time. This approach will not only help you to enjoy marketing your work more and make the process of promoting your writing less stressful, but it will also help you be more successful at the task at hand.
From personal experience, as a writer sometimes I tend to have too many irons in the fire and get excited about a couple of new ideas, while I still have one project I'm working on and something else that I need to work on promoting. This kind of energy can be good and help you be prolific, but remember to step back, take time to enjoy working on one project (whether you're writing or trying to generate publicity), and give it the attention it deserves.

Jane Friedman is a full-time entrepreneur (since 2014) and has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. She is the co-founder of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and is the former publisher of Writer’s Digest. In addition to being a columnist with Publishers Weekly and a professor with The Great Courses, Jane maintains an award-winning blog for writers at JaneFriedman.com. Jane’s newest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press, 2018).