Adding it up

How can one piece of pizza and a salad turn into three pieces of pizza, a salad and a cupcake?
I don’t know. But in just a few minutes I discovered pizza has the power to motivate me. I ate it. I loved it. And then I went and worked my butt off at the Y.
Now I need t figure out how I can use that same motivational technique in my writing.
It would have been easy to skip the Y tonight. It’s Friday. My friend wasn’t going. DD and DH were whining. But that pizza kept laughing at me and I knew it was go to the Y or let the pizza defeat me. So I laced up the tennis shoes and off I went.
It’s easy to skip writing too. It’s Friday. I’m tired. (hel-lo, I just cardiod 90 minutes!). DD and DH are whiny.
So I sit here writing my journal, knowing I have the very same decision to make. Only when it was the Y, it was about how my jeans fit, how my lungs feel so good when I hit that groove, how I want to lose more weight and look good in a bathing suit for the first time in my life. (Seriously! I’m even fat in my baby swim suit pictures!)
When it’s about writing, it’s about a lot more than how my clothes fit. It’s about how my soul fits.
I know. Weird.
But it’s true.
If I take tonight and write, it might not make a difference. I might write this entire book and it might go on to the next big rejection in the sky, under the bed, in the closet, wherever the heck it goes when an editor passes.
OR
it might be THE ONE. The story that connects with an editor and has them calling me saying the magic words we want to buy YOUR BOOK!
I think that’s the key.
With the Y, I know that even if the scale doesn’t move, my jeans are going to fit better because I defeated the monster otherwise known as over-eating Chuck E. Cheese pizza.
But with my book, currently known as Identity Crisis, I can pour all my time in it, live with the whiny dh and dd, and still end up with a “no thanks, better luck elsewhere.”
That’s where “how my soul fits” comes in.
Writers understand this. I think actors probably do too. When we pour ourselves onto the page, when we send the manuscript off to New York or Canada or where ever, it’s not just a bunch of black blobs on paper otherwise known as letters put together to form sentence that form paragraphs that somehow tell a story. When we close that envelope and drop that package in the mail, a piece of our soul goes along with it.
And no matter how many times we hear “don’t take it personally” about rejection, that’s just not very realistic.
Just like Getting THE CALL and not taking it personally isn’t very realistic. 🙂
But then sitting down to write on a Friday night with dh calling my name every five seconds and allowing myself to think the story I’m pouring my soul into is quite possibly going to be rejected along with the others isn’t all that soul nurturing. It’s not all that smart either. I mean if that’s the case, why bother?
It’s Friday night. I have a decision to make.
I already defeated the pizza. I better go defeat the doubt monster too. And maybe dh will quit calling my name. He’s just watching South Park anyway!