Tera Lynn Childs is the guest author for this Thursday's Author Tales! Tera is the author of Oh. My. Gods, which was released this May! I loved this book! You can check out my review of Oh. My. Gods. here. Don't forget to leave a comment to be entered in the Monthly Contest!
__________________________________________________________
LESSONS FROM MY PARENTS’ MARRIAGE
42 years
504 months
2,184 weeks
15,340 days (including leap days)
Today is my parents’ anniversary. They have been married for forty-two years. Yes, forty-two! Can you imagine committing to something--anything--for that long? I couldn’t ... until I realized I wanted to be a writer. Now I have my fingers and toes and eyes crossed, hoping my career will have the same longevity of their marriage.
My mom has three rules for building and maintaining a successful marriage, and I think an author can apply the same rules to their writing career.
1. 90/10 PRINCIPLE -- This means that both sides have to be prepared to give or compromise 90 percent, and expect only 10 percent in return. As an author, you have to rely on your agent, editor, copyeditor, cover artist, copy chief, publisher, sales reps, distributors, booksellers, reviewers, and countless others to make your book a reality and a success. As much as you would like to control other steps of the process, the only aspect of your career you can truly control is your writing. You have to focus your energy on producing the very best book possible, believing that you are putting in 90 percent of the effort. If you have the right team in place, they’ll be doing the same.
2. ALWAYS BE READY TO SAY YES -- I think this rule has more to do with risk-taking than anything else. My parents are not the sort to sit still and go with the flow. Since their wedding, they’ve lived in a dozen states and two countries and have moved at least two-dozen times. This is partly their nomadic nature, and partly a quest for the ideal. In order to have a successful writing career, you have to constantly be on that quest for the ideal. If I had stubbornly stuck with my first writing genre, I’d still be an unpublished historical romance author. But then I got this crazy idea for a YA book about descendants of the Greek gods. I took the risk and two years later OH. MY. GODS. is on the shelves. I don’t want to think about where my career would be if I hadn’t been ready to say "yes" to a new genre. You never know where trying something new will lead, but you’ll never find out if you’re afraid to try.
3. LOVE THE OTHER MORE THAN ANYTHING -- This reminds me of a line in a George Strait song, "If you can do anything else, do it." Writing, like any creative field, is a career that you have to love with an unconditional passion. It will kick you while you’re down, take every last ounce of your energy and emotions, and then expect you to give even more. Those are the times you start to question, when the doubts seep in and you wonder if all the blood, sweat, and tears are worth it. If you don’t love writing more than anything else you could possibly do, then at some point along the way you’ll give in to the temptation to quit.
There are no guarantees in the writing business, no one has all (or any of) the answers. But I’m in it for the long haul. And if applying these lessons to my career gets me as far as it’s gotten my parents, then I’ll have no complaints. When I get to year forty-two I’ll figure out where to go next.
__________________________________________________________
For more information about Tera, visit the following links!
website: http://www.teralynnchilds.com/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/teralynnchilds
blog: http://www.booksboysbuzz.com/
Thanks to Tera for a very insightful blog post!!