Okay – enough is enough, Susan. No more excuses.
Portraits of Celina
has been out for three months. It has been read, reviewed and reprinted. You
have received wonderful notes and emails and FB messages, and you have done
what you can to promote it: school visits, library visits, festivals, panel
sessions, conferences, interviews and articles. You have blogged and facebooked and tweeted.
There will be more opportunities – and they will be
wonderful and appreciated – but it is time to let go. To stop being that
helicopter parent hovering over and worrying about your latest little book baby
and how it is doing in the big bad world. Slash the apron strings, Susan. Let
Bayley and Celina tell their stories to whoever wishes to listen to them. They are
no longer your characters. They belong to your readers, and you must move on.
You have a new novel to write and it is not going to write itself. It requires
time, effort – and in the (paraphrased) words of Ernest Hemingway “you need
to sit at your typewriter and bleed”.
Remember Shay? And Riley? Remember that image you have of
them: torn, crying, bereft, but loving each other to bits? Remember Shay touching
Riley’s face and telling him she will fix it, fix him? That she would never
leave his side no matter what he’s done? Remember your blog post about Dad and
those tangly webs? Remember that?
You have another story to tell. And I think it could be a good one, one worth telling. And, yes, it is going to be
hard. Really hard. It is going to take a long time. You are going to doubt
yourself and at times you will feel as if you are writing nothing but rubbish –
and maybe it will be, just that, rubbish, but maybe it won’t. But, Susan, you
have to give it your best shot. Come on, put a lid on those doubts, silence
those excuses and, please, please, just get on with it.
Like now.
