Work to Publish

I didn’t come up with this one all by myself, Jack Conte coined the term, as did Elizabeth Gilbert with, “Done is better than good.”

I didn’t call it anything when I started, besides maybe spam posting your art. But when I would get home from my night of many photos I would select and upload my favorites to Flickr (back when they thought free, unlimited storage was a thing companies could offer). I took photos because I was deeply driven to, I was passionate about it, and I’d share them with my friends and family (some photos to their chagrin).

Now I’ve found, especially with my first novel Swee, that if I don’t set a deadline to share a project, it can and will sit on my hard drive collecting digital dust until someone (me) decides to do something with it. Both of my poetry collections were like that. I worked on An Opened Book End and Starlight for years, had several years of a break where I didn’t write poetry at all, then painfully pulled myself through the editing process. Maybe there is a secret for letting books sit for a while before they simmer and you become detached to them so they can be edited, but I know the countless half-finished songs on my external hard drives are not the key to success.

Working to publish mean that when I start a project, I only start it with the intent to finish it. If I find myself straying from that goal, I either need to set myself a deadline (which I should have done in the first place and will try my best to do going forward…but so far…) or decide I’m not going to finish the project. I do…