Saturday, June 29, 2013

Building the dream

When I first started this blog back in March, I felt as if I were throwing words into a black hole. Yes, I studied up on SEO tips and got the word out to my family, friends, and fellow writing wizards. But still I wondered: would anyone ever find me here?

This week I received proof that at least one person did. Check out this post by blogger Andrew Grant, "I Used to Be a Perfectionist, But I'm Better Now." I think you'll recognize little old moi. He quotes my post from the first of this month on the same topic—and even says my title is brilliant! Well, naturally. Thank you, Andrew, not just for the shout out, but also for the post itself, especially these words that I keep reading over and over.

"...the antidote for our perfectionist procrastination is to simply do something.  Do something that’s good enough and then do something else and something else and keep on doing something else until, before you know it, you have built the dream."

Another gift this week came from writer Kristi Holl.



I reviewed her excellent book Boundaries for Writers here last month; I keep hearing echoes of it in my head as I face the daily struggle to clear time and "headspace" so I can work on my middle grade novel.


This morning I awoke to find that she'd chosen to write about my book, Spontaneous Combustion, on her aptly-named Writer's First Aid blog. What moved me most about her post, "Nourish Your Soul with Spontaneous Combustion," was when she revealed that she reads part of my book every day before she starts work on her her own novel. That gives me goosebumps, literally, to know that I can help another writer in that way. And it's just what I hoped my book would do when I wrote it. Thank you so much for sharing that, Kristi. It means a great deal to me.


2 comments:

Vijaya said...

Aw Nancy, it is always a strange thing throwing words out in the blogosphere ... but people who need to, find us.

Goosebumps indeed! Get used to it. We read your book and share it, tape quotations to our desks.

Nancy Butts said...

You just made me smile, Vijaya. Writing is of necessity a solitary act, so it means all the more to realize that even when we're alone at our desks, we are bound together in this way—through the words we write, not just for readers but for each other, as writers.