I'm feeling the pressure...

It's been almost two months since I pressed the "publish" button for the first time. It's been a bit chaotic since then because of the Thanksgiving holiday and my cruise and then Christmas and New Years so I pretty much just pushed the button and focused on other things.

Now that the holidays are over and the new year begun, it's time to take a look at everything, get a read on where I am, and decide what I'm doing, where I'm going, and how I plan to get there.

There is still a lot of noise in the romance writing realm about doing this or doing that and following certain rules and making sure that all the Ts are crossed and all the Is are dotted--whatever the Ts and Is might be. But then I hear a few voices going against the grain saying the things that really resonate with me.


I have to keep listening for those voices.

There's so much that can be done, and maybe should be done, but that doesn't mean I have to try to do them all at once. And that's the pressure. I keep having to stop and remind myself that I have a plan. Does it need to be tweaked? Yes. Does it need to be expanded? Yes. But being a published author is not brain surgery. No one is going to die if I wait a year to expand to print or setup audio or translate for foreign markets.

Maybe I don't make as much money up front, but I also don't want to miss out on life because I'm chained to a keyboard trying to learn stuff and then implementing what I've learned.

As just one little ol' me, I only have so much time and brain capacity. So I learn what I need to learn for this part of the journey and take a deep breath when the pressure starts squeezing at me.

Despite all of that, there's one key piece to the puzzle: keep writing. Without new books, the rest doesn't matter much.

Hope your year is starting off right!!