HomeSo, I had the baby the 9th, and everything is wonderful with that. (Thanks for asking!) With the baby here you have to understand that baby matters are forefront on my brain. (Milk, poop, sleeping, not sleeping, that sort of thing.) Since it’s my blog, and you clicked here of your own free will, I can talk about any body fluid I want.
The second thing you need to do is go here and read a short story I just got published. Nathan Lilly runs Spacewestern.com, and it is fantastic. There’s a connection here between breastfeeding and this short story, but I’ll get there.
If you’ve never breastfed, here’s what you need to do. It takes time. It is hella time consuming. I’ll break down the numbers for you, in case you aren’t yourself a mom. Ever two to three hours you need to sit down and give your infant a full twenty minutes to half an hour of your time. Maybe, you can do something else with a free hand, (pick out an email, read a novel, whatever,) but mostly you have to sit down and be still. You have to wait and be patient while nothing appears to happen. It isn’t as if you can watch your newborn fatten up or grow bigger right before your eyes. There’s a lot going on behind the scene, but in all that time you devote to breastfeeding, (and lets face it, the nipple tenderness and engorgment pain,) you don’t really see change or success until much later.
Why mention this and my short story for Spacewestern? Because it’s a truth of publishing as well that you need to know upfront. I sold ‘No Child of Mine’ to Nathan over a year ago. Things happened and as a result things over at the site went on hiatus for a while. Sometimes this happens with a sold short story, sometimes there’s no clear reason why it takes a year or years for something to show up in published form. Sometimes it never shows up at all. (But that’s another post.) As a writer, you’ll spend years out of your life sitting still, nurtring your writing, your connection with editors and fellow writers and for many long stretches at a time you see absolutly no return. You can ping editors, you must keep writing, but at the end of the day, sometimes all you can do is wait and be still.
Here’s the other thing you may not have been told when you were reading a million articles on writing: Assume you aren’t getting paid this year.
You think I’m joking, think again. Whatever you’ve written, no matter what you’ve sold, and sometimes in spite of what your contract says, you can’t assume your going to get paid early, on time, or even this year. I’m not saying you won’t get paid, (that’s up to you to fight for every penny,) but I am saying that there are no immidate rewards in writing. Just like breastfeeding.
(Okay, yeah, there’s the bonding, the feeling of love, bla bla bla bla. But love doesn’t get your baby to college alone, and love doesn’t buy dinner.)
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