The Tortured Authors’ Department

Taylor Swift encapsulates every author’s relationship with publishing

My dear friend Megan Jaregui Eccles said it about four minutes before I thought it (she must have hit ‘play’ on the new album faster than I did):

The relationship that breaks your heart the most often is the one with your art, not the one with a man, especially when the industry that pays you for your art demands that you market yourself online, performing as an author for the public that will someday, hopefully buy your books and make the circle complete.

“All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was shouting, ‘More!’”

We come online and we perform Authorship. We talk about our process and we network with other authors and writers and we offer encouragement to those who are newly joining our ranks. We’re very publicly Being Writers Online, fed by clicks and likes and shares and comments, but inside crying and dying and knowing we’ll never feel like we’ve ‘made it’ in this industry.

When you’re drafting, you are certain you’ll feel complete when you get to the end of the first draft, but then you learn about editing and revising.

So you trade manuscripts and feedback and you’re confident that you’ll feel like a real writer when the manuscript…