How to live the dream?

​I recently finished a new book. It’s now with my agent for pitching and it suddenly hit me that getting published doesn’t end all the ups and downs and the worrying and the wondering. It just allows you to step onto this marvellous rolling road. It’s then down to you whether to go with the flow – whether to let the rolling road determine the speed or whether to walk as well. Or run. Or race...
​Whether, in short, to worry, to run so fast you trip...or smile in wonder.
Facing up to this for a moment gave me a wobble. Fact is, it is much too easy as an author to glance around too often. I’m so delighted with what I have achieved…but glance too much and there is a danger you will put yourself down because there will always be others doing better. Selling more books. Making bigger deals.
The important thing, I learn, is to remember always how very lucky we are to be here at all. To this end, I have deliberately positioned my little bookshelf of published novels en route to my kitchen. It means I pass it every day – an important reminder that the dream has come true already.
And so if I get a momentary worry about a current project, an edit or a pitch, I simply pick up the Korean version of my debut. Yes...Korean. My words....in Korean. I remind myself how completely crazy this is and tell myself to give thanks.
You are published in Korean, Teresa. Stop worrying. Sure - keeping this dream alive is now down to me. But choosing how to live it is also down to me.
I write because I love to write. And I want to get better, not to compete with others, but to be better than the writer I was yesterday. Which is why I  wanted to use this quote for my blog.
So I share it today with pride and thanks to all those who have helped me on the journey so far. Also to sign off to do the only sensible thing after any writer types  THE END and is going on sub all over again..
Which, of course, is not to think too much about how the pitching is going...but to start a new book….

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