no guarantees and I'm staying in doors

it was a crazy idea the way I'm feeling to think of going outside so been living off leftovers and websurfing. I love this from Laurie R King
There ain’t no guarantees in the writing business. It’s scary even to mention the possibility, as if failure is a demon summoned by voicing his name, but it’s very true, it’s waiting just outside. I’ve got sixteen books out there, sold a couple million copies, had titles on the New York Times list, and still, every day I feel the cold draft at the bottom of the door. My accountant talks about SEP accounts, and I think, well, that may be necessary. My husband asks if we’re going to have the money for some project or another, and I have to tell him I don’t know.

You’d think I would be the last person able to function with that degree of uncertainty in her life. I’m a fairly structured person; I like things more or less tidy; it annoys me when people are late, and annoys me enormously when I am late. How can I blithely sail into the end of the year not knowing how many zeros will be on my income return the following?

In part, I think, it helps to sneak into the whole writing-as-income thing backwards. When I started, my husband was earning well, and my income was supplement—for example, my advance from Sweden bought central heating, so we only had to use the wood stove when we wanted to. (It was a Scandinavian wood stove, too: I liked the balance of events.) By the time he retired and I was earning with some regularity, it was too late to remember that my earning was at the whims of fortune.

So how do you keep on, feeling that cold breeze moving around your ankles?

You keep on the same way you keep on with whatever book you’re writing: one word at a time.

It helps a lot to be an efficient compartmentalizer, which I am. I focus on what’s at hand, put aside the less pressing and those things I can’t do anything about yet, and try to sweat about only those things I can change. I may not feel I can do anything about the quality of my first draft, but I can certainly move on with the quantity, so I keep writing. I can’t do anything about the state of the publishing market or the tastes of the reading public, but I can keep writing, so I do. I can’t do anything about the overall plot or character development on the manuscript that’s sitting on my desk at the moment, because my editor would kill me and the mortgage company would repossess if I said I needed another six months on it, but I can do something about the copy editor’s wrong corrections and the occasional clumsy phrase that catches my eye, so I do.

I suppose it’s something like the Wright Brothers must have felt. Long, painstaking, mistake-strewn months when you can’t even see the body of what you’re building; then the slow, exciting coming together of wings and wheels, props and flaps; and finally the moment when it’s all together, when you climb in, pull down your goggles, and mail it off to New York.

It’s an exhilarating fifteen-second ride.

And then you pull up your laptop and get started on the next one.