What am I going to do next?

I'm reading Eric Maisel's Making Your Creative Mark again this week.  This time it's my bedtime reading, a snatch of a positive chapter on which to fall asleep.  In his chapter 'the Mind Key', he talks about 'minding your mind'.  What he means by that is becoming aware of our thoughts, identifying the negative ones, and replacing them with more positive thoughts.

"Notice what you are thinking, dispute those thoughts that bad-mouth you... and replace them with thoughts that better serve you," he says.  If only it were that easy!  But one later part of that chapter really resonated with me.  He gives an example of artists who self-sabotage, and when I was reading that I was reminded of my own self-sabotage with my novel Starfire.

I wrote this book a good six or seven years ago, and I have never sent it out on submission anywhere.  Why not?  Because I self-sabotaged that piece of my creativity.  I told myself that the novel was just my homage to two sets of books I loved - Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series, and C J Cherryh's Chanur Saga.  I told myself that my book was derivative, that it didn't have anything special to say.  So I put the file on my shelf, where it stayed until the beginning of this year.

I had a conversation with John Berlyne of the Zeno Agency about my self-sabotage at the Winchester Writers' Conference last year.  His reply was an emphatic "get it out there". So at the start of the year I changed the novel from single viewpoint to multi-viewpoint.  I'd told myself the novel was plodding because I only had one viewpoint character explaining things.  I've just finished the final edits on the multi viewpoint re-write.  And I've beefed up the main character's emotional journey too.  The book is edited and polished, and ready to go out on submission,

"What are we going to do next?" Maisel asks.  "What you do next (after a rejection) may affect how you spend the next year, or even the rest of your life."

"Decide that your basic armament is a thick skin," he says,  "these blows (rejections) are regular.  Know how you are going to deal with this so that they don't blindside you."

So next week, despite all the other crap going on in my life, Starfire is going out on submission. I will not self-sabotage the success of that novel any longer.