A Marathon, not a Sprint

The title of this post may not be original to one of my self-publishing heroes, Hugh Howey, but I first found the phrase in one of his blog posts. It seems to be antithetical to the writing philosophy of the three gents from the Self Publishing Podcast, whose philosophy is encapsulated in a title of their "how-to" book WRITE, PUBLISH, REPEAT. However, Howey may agree with them. He was talking about success as a self published author, not about writing itself. Though he doesn't crank out the words like those three, he would if he found himself in the right circumstances, I imagine.

I'm not sure where I stand personally on this notion. At my age, I may not live long enough to see success at the end of a "marathon," but the word-of-mouth deluge of sales ain't happening either. This doesn't exactly inspire me to crank out the words. It's taken me far longer than I would like to reach 25,000 words in the rough draft of the third and final novel of the McConnell crime series. I'll stop there and clean up a PDF of VISITATION RITES, so that I can publish it through Amazon's Createspace as a paperback.

It will be available fairly soon, and I will likely be the only person who will have a hard copy of it. Why am I doing it? Ego! It simply feels good to glance now and then at what is now two (soon to be three and slowly growing) titles by T. K. Laverents on my bookshelf.

But here's to hoping that the marathon of success finishes before whatever ailments I'm feeling finally kill me...