Followers

I have followers!  I feel a great sense of responsibility now to keep this blog updated, so thank you to everybody who has paid a visit.  I hope the blog is of interest to you and i hope you will continue to visit over the coming months to see how i fare in my quest to get a novel published.

I read an interview with Wilbur Smith on Sunday (Live, Mail on Sunday, Dec 5 2010).  Two of the many pieces of advice he gave were to 'be disciplined' and to 'believe in yourself.'  I'll come back to being disciplined in a moment.  We've all heard a hundred times the importance of believing in yourself; of having thick skin; of the need to take rejection and use it as a motivation.  Wilbur Smith's first novel, The God's First Make Mad, was 180,000 words long - all that sweat and toil - and it was never published.  He didn't let that stop him.  I imagine that i will be distraught if my novel doesn't go anywhere.  I guess the true test of my character will be whether i bounce back from rejection and start from page one again with a whole new set of characters and ideas.  Actually, i have a plan...which i might reveal...later.

As for being disciplined, it goes hand in hand with self-belief.  If you have that belief then all you need is the discipline to finish what you have started.  If you don't have that discipline then you'll never get past halfway.  Rejection isn't failure.  You can't be rejected unless you have suceeded in writing your manuscript.  So as i said in an earlier post, just keep writing.  Good, bad or ugly, as long as it keeps the story moving forward, just write it.  Nobody's going to say okay, stop, finished, you can't make any changes.  Remember that the manuscript is yours to nurture until you decide to release it to the wild. 

I want to explain the name of my blog site, Blog of Whispers.  What does that have to do with writing a manuscript and sharing the experience with others?  Well...simple really.  The working title for my manuscript is 'Book of Whispers.'  I wanted the blog to be about the process of writing the book, so it was a way of keeping me focussed on that.  Discipline.  Speaking of which, i'm slipping into debt again.