Success

I stayed up until just past 2 AM last night to finish up my copyedits.

Which is pretty awesome, really. Now I just have to mail them off so they get to the publisher by Tuesday and then I write like mad for the next few months to get that second book done. (And thanks to my detailed outline, I’ve got a vague idea of where I’m going. *cough*)

Anyway, I was pondering this morning on the meaning of success. Clearly everyone has different goals and different definitions of the term. Plus I suspect one’s personal interpretation changes as you go through life.

After all, if you actually manage to accomplish your goal, then thee’s nothing left but to continue setting the bar higher, right?

I sort of work within that metaphor for getting pubbed. When I was an aspiring author, getting an agent was the thing…and then the publishing deal. Now it’s not having crappy sales or lousy reviews. (Although I can’t really control either one of those things.) The concept of making the NY Times Best Seller list is beginning to percolate in the back of my head some – although I suspect that’s really nothing more than a bit of a pipe dream, at the moment – one that seems nearly as impossible to me as getting an agent was six months ago. Funny how things change.

I could get lucky, though. (Plug: BUY! MY! BOOK! RIGHT! NOW!)

Although strangely enough, my inner most definition of publishing success is apparently seeing my book in the discount rack at the local grocery store. Which is probably pretty weird, but there it is. Every single time I’ve been to the Giant in the last year (and that’s a lot, btw. My kids are insanely hungry), I found myself looking at that rack, longing to see my book there. It’s actually one of the things that has driven me to finish writing that first book, to send it off, to pitch it. To start writing the next one. To keep daring to hope that I might actually manage it.

Not that I won’t be a melting pile of goo the first time I walk into B&N or Borders and see it there either. (I will. Expect goofy pictures.) There’s just something about the idea of seeing it next to a package of water balloons and silly string that screams “Made it!” to me.

But I’m also a bit of an idiot that way, so who knows?

X-Posted at Borrowing Heaven, Subletting Hell

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