Changes for the better

Oh, hi there! Remember me? I'm Sarah, the lady who's supposed to be running this blog. Ringing any bells? Maybe. Maybe not. It's been a while. Oh, you're sweet, I missed you, too.

My name is Sarah and it has been 56 days since my last blog post.

And that makes me sad.

I love this little blog and all you fabulous people who read it. But the reality is I was also starting to hate it. I was burnt out...on everything.

This summer I didn't blog (obviously), I barely wrote any new fiction words at all, I slowed way down on responding to queries and was a pretty sucky agent if I'm being honest (which is kinda the point of having a blog).

Every time I sat down at my computer to work, my brain turned to mush and all my motivation leaked out. Instead of continuing to bang my head on my desk, I focused on me, because I obviously needed some work.

I took that time to spend with my family who was feeling a little neglected. I thought about what I want and where I see myself in five years. I gave myself permission to stop and reevaluate.

So what now?

For starters, I'm moving the blog to once a week. I love the time I spend here, but I know that three posts a week will put my right back in burn out mode and that is bad. So rather than give it up all together, I'm going to scale back and hopefully find the joy that initially got me started blogging. I've also scrapped all the really crappy blog posts that I had originally been planning for this fall and now have a decent list of posts that should take me through the fall. Since I'll have time to really think about them and spend time focusing on quality over quantity, I'm hoping you get more out of them as well.

I'm making a lot of other changes. I'm not quite ready to announce all of them officially yet. But I promise to share when the time is right. I think we can learn a lot from each other when we are open and honest. It can demystify the wide world of publishing and help each of us better manage our expectations and goals.

What does this mean for you?

For starters, I hope it means a better experience when you visit me here at my little piece of the web, but I hope this post shows more than that.

I hope it helps you to give yourself permission to step back when you need to. I hope it puts your own set-backs into perspective when you can see someone else fail. And I hope it inspires you to see me not allow that failure to stop me from pushing forward with my goals.

The internet can sometimes be a photoshopped image of the real world. We often only get to glimpse the successes and it's natural for people to want others to see them in a positive setting. But that's not how the real world works. We all have failures and stumbles along our path. We all have days where we know if anyone peaked through our windows they'd be convinced we live in a nut house. We all screw up.

Those are hard things to say. But it's important for all of us to hear them.

So today, I'm owning that and pushing on. I hope no matter where you are in your journey, you'll choose to push on as well.