Publish or perish.

In the academic world, for professors, there used to be a phrase bandied about. Publish or perish. If you didn’t publish a book as a professor, your career was over. I don’t know if that is still true for college professors, however, I do know that is what it feels like for unpublished authors.

I am an unpublished author.

I love to write. I have stories in my head that are constantly begging me to put them down on paper. I love my stories. So far, I have not found an agent who has fallen in love with them as well. But it’s just a matter of time, right?

In the mean time, I have to stay focused, keep on track and continue to write and improve my writing. Simple. Easy. Not a problem. Hah.

Publish or perish.

That is a bit what it feels like. We pour our hearts and souls into our writing. We finish a book, enter it into contests and find out that others don’t even like our story much less love it the way we do. We finally get the courage to tell our family and friends that we’ve written a book, they cheer then start to avoid the “how’s the writing going?” question after a couple years have gone by and we aren’t published. Why aren’t we published? Are we bad writers? After a while we begin to ask ourselves the same question.

Publish or perish.

I know writers who had their first book published – they’re really annoying, but I’ve still cheered them on. I know many others who have written for ten years or more before they were published, I’ve cheered them on and on. The great thing about those writers is that they did not perish. Not after the first year of being unpublished, or the fifth or the sixteenth. They somehow managed to survive in this crazy rollercoaster of an upublished author’s life and continue on until they achieved their goal, their dream.

It would be wonderful if we could all be published right now. But it is not up to us. We are at the mercy of agents, editors, publishing houses, the market and pure luck. So, we have to find a way to keep our writing career alive until we are published. Foruntately, we’ve had many, many others who have shown us that we won’t perish if we do not get published this month or even this year.

Publish or perish.

When I start to gasp, frantically sucking in air, searching desperately for that small bit of oxygen to keep myself going, and I wonder if this is it, my last hurrah – my fingers find the keyboard and the words start to flow and I know that I’m not done for yet.

What keeps you going?