Inching along

How I feel about myself as a writer has everything to do with how I feel about what I'm writing at the moment, not what I've written in the past. I don't take a sum total of past books and create a writer's ego--it's entirely about what I'm working on now. The current struggle. And if the struggle is, shall we say, struggling, then I feel like the most ragtag lame excuse for a writer ever. I feel like such a poser as I go to signings and conferences, accepting compliments for past books but thinking, If only you knew that I'm washed up, that I'm a fraud, that I may have managed to write some nice books before but that's all over now.

Yep. Bayern 4. Just finished a third draft. It took me four months. I usually do a dozen drafts. At this rate, I'll be done in three years. Awesome.