All About the Attitude

I received the nicest e-mail today. Made my day, my week, my whole year.

Thank you, again, to the fabulous Marilyn Brant, whose debut ACCORDING TO JANE is coming out in October 2009, published by Kensington.

And Marilyn got me thinking about two things: keeping a positive attitude and professional jealousy.

On the first topic... keeping positive in this business is always tough. And for me these past couple of years, I'd venture to say extremely tough. (The post Molly made about surviving the submission process was at least in part directed at the insanity she's been seeing in me lately. (Although me reading secret messages into Molly's blog post may just be a symptom of my insanity.)

Anyone who knows me well, knows I'm no Pollyanna, but I think I can be balanced. While I admit I've been imagining the worst case scenario a lot lately and second guessing many things, I just as often concoct elaborate best case scenario fantasies and find the silver lining in my defeats. Keeping your chin up is hard in this business, unless you're totally naive or deluded.

But on to professional jealousy. That's one place where I hope Molly's fab line about crazy inviting professional jealousy over for a BBQ wasn't directly aimed at me. Because I think my brand of crazy tends to invite insecurity over more often than professional jealousy. In fact, these past months, I think my crazy has invited insecurity over for more than a BBQ. They've been shacking up. I'm hoping they get into a monster fight and break it off soon. (Sadly, crazy and insecurity seem made for each other.)

And as Sinead said in her great post a couple of weeks ago, (that I also read secret messages directed to me in), a little insecurity can be a good thing. It can make us try harder to continually get better.

But back to the topic at hand. While I can't claim never to have felt professional jealousy, I also don't think it's one I dwell on. I really can't see the point. If author X sells a book, or does really well, I really don't see how that affects me, except that if I know them, I enjoy sharing in their joy. Love, love, love seeing books written by people I know, or know of, on the shelves or on bestseller lists.

And when people on writers loops get their collective noses all out of joint when a celebrity sells a book for huge bucks. Do I wish I had a big book deal? Sure. But a celebrity getting one doesn't have anything to do with me, so why be jealous or angry? I can't offer a publisher a huge platform or built in readership like a celebrity, or even an already well-established author can.

And even if the publishing world worked in such a way that there were a finite number of publishing contracts available, such that if someone I know scored one, that was one less chance for me, I think that 99% of the time I'd still be genuinely pleased for the person who got one. But publishing doesn't really work like that and I am always glad to hear about other writers getting contracts or their books selling well or hitting lists.

The only times I felt some serious professional jealousy, leading me to say spiteful things to my friends about another writer, it's related to very specific situations where I felt either like I'd been used, or said person became condescending after selling, as if they suddenly knew some secret, or possessed more talent, just because they got a contract before me. Especially if said contract is with a publisher I wouldn't want to be published by. That bugs me. But 99.9% of writers I know aren't like that at all.

99.9% of the writers I know are the most supportive people I've come across in my entire life.

Thanks again for your kind words, Marilyn. You rock!