How much ego should I wear today?...

This writing, publishing business can do weird-ass things to your ego. Rejections knock you round but you have to toughen up and forge ahead, having faith that what you have written is good enough to be printed, bound and sold for money. But there are thousands of people out there with the same self belief and confidence - can we all be right to feel this way? How many rejections can an ego take? And if we get an acceptance it changes everything. Some one else agrees with our self belief and is willing to bank on us. No longer is it 'I hope I'm good enough'. We can now say "I am good enough'. But we are only as good as our last book, (unless you are some strange literary icon who can dine out forever on the strength of just one book) and if we want to stay writing we have to start the whole process again. Think you have this writing thing in the bag because you've been published? Probably not.

You must have faith in your own talent to keep trying, keep submitting but because the appreciation of writing is such a subjective thing you are guaranteed not to please all of the people all of the time. It is confusing to be loved by some and dismissed by others. In New Zealand I think there is a particular difficulty in balancing your ego as we don't like our poppies too tall. And while we all get that self-promotion is now an expected part of our job descriptions certain quarters frown upon this. We must keep our fingers crossed that others will choose to talk about us and our work in public forums which is a little sad when you consider all the work and effort that has gone in to getting our story published. So if I seem a little split personality sometimes, please excuse me. It just means I'm not sure what percentage of ego to wear.

I want me some focus-straightening-writer's-specs

Common advice to writers is to focus on writing the next book whilst waiting to hear responses to those manuscripts already out at the publishers. This is, in my opinion, tremendous advice. A writer always needs more work to send out and it distracts from the whole business of trying to wait and pretending to be patient. But there is a spanner in the works of this advice. Pretending to be patient, especially when a few months have passed, gums up the works. I become (for want of a better word - sorry folks) constipated with my writing. I'm not blocked (that word is frowned on in this house) as i have ideas and ways to move forward on my stories, but my focus is affected and sitting down to write is...lets say, difficult. As my assignment is finally finished and is now winging its way down to Christchurch I think I may play hookey for a day or two and see if I get my focus back. Otherwise I may need to investigate the acquiring of some special focus-straightening-writers-glasses - I woner if these will be available at the Spinning Gold conference.

I am also finding that while recent events have well motivated my writing of short works, my longer works are experiencing a dip in confidence and they have been seen wearing hoodies and milling around with bad postures in darkened corners at the mall.